


all before us lie

by ponderinfrustration



Series: time's wingéd chariot [4]
Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
Genre: Academia, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Friendship, Gen, Grief, Ireland, Politics, Romance, tuberculosis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-12
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:00:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 44
Words: 96,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21771847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponderinfrustration/pseuds/ponderinfrustration
Summary: In a life of ninety-four years, there are a great many things that Raoul de Chagny has forgotten. But there are a great many more that he remembers, and mostly they are people who have meant the world to him.Christine Daaé hopping in and out of his timeline is just one part.
Relationships: Christine Daaé/Erik | Phantom of the Opera, Christine Daaé/La Sorelli, Comte Philippe de Chagny/La Sorelli, Raoul de Chagny/Darius (Phantom of the Opera)
Series: time's wingéd chariot [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1477541
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> The final part of the time travel AU. A short chapter to start, but this fic feels like it will be something of a Project.  
> Title, again, from 'To His Coy Mistress'

There are things he remembers all of his life.

The impression of Philippe, tall and brave beside him, telling him it’s all right to walk into the sea. The water cool against his knees. The sun glinting gold on the waves, grains of sand between his toes. The screams of gulls overhead. How he slipped and fell, but before the water could pull him under, Philippe scooped him into his arms and out of harm’s way and he laughed, laughed as his brother swung him up high because it felt like flying, felt like he was one of the birds and he could grab them if he was only quick enough.

There are things Raoul de Chagny remembers all of his life. That day when he was two is one of the best of all.

* * *

If he had been older when his parents died, maybe it would have cut him worse. But his mother died when he was a baby, hardly a week old, and his father died when he was three. He has no clear memory of the man, except height, and distance, and a white beard, like something in a painting. All there is of him are shadows, and an echo that might be a voice, the glint of a ring on a finger.

It is as if his parents belonged to somebody else, as if they never existed outside of stories, were never any part of him.

It is Philippe he remembers best. Philippe, who tucked him in at night, and lay down beside him to tell him stories. Philippe, who he would press himself to when he was tiny and scared, and didn’t want to be alone. Philippe who promised him that he would never need to be frightened.

Philippe, who taught him to read, and to write, and decided he should learn how to play the piano, that it was only right and proper.

Philippe, who took him out on a boat every weekend every summer, from when he was five, who taught him ropes and knots and how to count the stars, and find his way in the dark.

He remembers everything about Philippe, and how he smiled, and how his voice was soft whispering in the darkness, and how the bad dreams never came, when his brother was at his side. How his hair looked like gold under the sun, and his eyes were as blue as the sky.

(He remembers, too, how he missed him when he was old enough to go to school. And it was never so easy to sleep, in a dormitory of other boys, without Philippe just down the hall, without the tinkling of soft music from the parlour, but it was part of growing up, part of becoming a man, and that was all he wanted to do, to grow up and become a man, and be like Philippe.)

* * *

He doesn’t remember the day they told him Philippe was dead.

Heaven knows he’s tried to remember. Oh how he’s _tried_. It must be in his head somewhere, buried behind everything else. He was sixteen, and he might not have been a man, but he was far from a child either, and logic dictates that he should have some memory of it.

He tries to reach it, has tried to reach it so many times, but it’s just this space where a memory used to be.

He’s never been able to remember it.

He has been fortunate, in his life, to be friends with psychiatrists who have made a whole study of traumatic events and the influence of childhood in forming the man. (There’s a whole study there, to be done on some of the men he’s known, but psychiatry has never been his field and he is far from equipped to carry it out.) The idea of something so terrible happening that it becomes locked in the brain and is never fully experienced, though everything else is experienced through it.

(Anger, and grief.)

But he can’t find the memory of the day Philippe died.

He remembers afterwards. Remembers seeing his brother’s face, and it didn’t much seem like his brother’s face, so pale and waxy. There was a cut above his eye that had been stitched closed, and they covered it in make-up when they laid him out but they couldn’t quite hide it, and it was still a blemish that he could put his fingers to, a ridge like a scar, if there had been time for a scar to form.

(Across more than seventy years, he remembers the feel of it beneath his fingertips.)

He’s often wondered, if he should have had them pull the sheet down past Philippe’s shoulders, had them show him the terrible wounds that must have been there on his chest, the ones that killed him, the shrapnel from the bomb and the splintered ribs, but he didn’t ask, didn’t think that he could, and there was no breath in his lungs.

* * *

He remembers telling Sorelli.

It was only the fourth time he’d met her, his brother’s fiancée, as she was then. (And he still has the letter Philippe wrote him when he was in Clongowes, to say he’d proposed and she’d said yes, and they’d agreed to marry when she was out of the hospital, whenever that would be.)

She’d always been polite to him, always had a smile for him, but he’d never readily spoken to her before, beyond formalities, beyond her breathy laugh.

(He remembers the way Philippe cried, to tell him of the TB in her bones, how he sipped brandy, and couldn’t speak, the tears trickling down his face, and there was nothing he could say, but how he ached to say something, so he hugged him in place of words, and Philippe wept into his shoulder, and it seemed wrong that he should be comforting his brother, his brother who was more like a father, but there were tears in his eyes, too.)

That it fell to him to tell her— but there was no one else.

He can still see, behind his eyes, how she looked that way. Sitting in her bed beside the window, the light glinting on her dark hair, her leg in a cage. He knew there were twenty other girls on the ward, but he couldn’t see any of them, could only see the book open on her lap that she wasn’t reading, , the tilt of her head as she looked out the window at the rain. Every detail sharp in his mind, down to the pallor of her skin.

That she would have been his sister-in-law—

Nothing in the world felt real, his legs not even his own, none of the words felt right, but he didn’t have to speak them, because when she looked at him she knew, and it was all he could do to keep breathing, as he whispered about the bomb.

She closed her eyes, and released a slow breath, and that was the moment that choked him.

* * *

He doesn’t remember much of the funeral. Mostly the people, pressing close to shake his hand, the coffin before him and the glowing lights, shining off the dark stain of the wood.

The disbelief, that his brother was in there.

How was Philippe in there?

* * *

He sat beside the coffin all night, unable to speak a word, unable to think of very much of anything at all. Just looking at it, feeling half-tethered, the prayers cycling back through his head, the Latin circling and circling. _Salve Regina…mater misericordiae…_

All these people he didn’t know, coming to tell him how sorry they were. Why would they be sorry? They weren’t the ones who set the bomb. They didn’t kill his brother. Why would they be sorry?

Who were they? All these strange faces, unknown to him. Why did they come?

And the girl, the girl with the golden hair. Wrapped in a coat too big for her, her face as white as he felt, the redness of her eyes, and her fingers were slim in his, something about her that struck his heart., that knocked the air from his lungs. Her hair golden in the candlelight, and those eyes, bloodshot blue like a mirror, her fingers slipping from his, and he tried to grasp them, but they were gone.

The fingers and the girl, lost back in the crowd.

A new hollowness, spreading beneath his ribs.

He choked on the breath in his throat.


	2. 2

He doesn’t remember the first time Philippe brought him to visit their parents’ grave. Their _family’s_ grave. Mother and father together, and two little sisters ( _older_ sisters), who were born, and lived, and died before he was born. (Little Lily, fifteen years older than him, and there are photographs of her with Philippe as a boy, two golden-haired children smiling and laughing, and he always sees her as she was at the age of eight, happy and well before TB twisted her bones and took her away; and little Maria, three years older than him, only four months when meningitis that was TB too stopped her little heart.)

He often wondered what it would have been like, to grow up with sisters. A world so different, and would his parents have lived too?

(Every cough he ever got, every cold, did Philippe worry that this was it, back again to rob him of the last of his family?)

He doesn’t remember the first time he visited that grave, but he remembers misting drizzle and a grey sky, and Philippe holding his hand a little tighter.

(Would Philippe have lived, in that other world?)

* * *

They buried Philippe separately.

He doesn’t remember why. Maybe it was that some part of him, at sixteen, thought it best to keep the rest of his family hidden, to keep them safe away from journalists and photographers and gawking eyes and tramping feet. Maybe it was that the headstone was already so full, and to add another name, to add more dates, would somehow make Philippe seem lesser, somehow diminish him. He doesn’t remember making the decision, doesn’t remember thinking about it, but they buried Philippe in his own grave, in a quiet part of Glasnevin.

(He went many times, that first summer, just to see him, just to be close to him, but it never felt as if he was really there, never felt he was visiting anything more than a stone with a name, and a plot of earth, but still he went to visit it.)

Was it a mistake, to bury him separately?

Should he have kept the family together?

(A family, scattered, and when his own time comes, is it right to disturb either grave, or must he, too, be separate?)

* * *

He spent most of that year reading. Reading, and trying not to feel. Keats, Shelley, Joyce. Sassoon, Brittain, O’Connor. Yeats, Synge. Hugo, Flaubert. Volumes of poetry, volumes of medicine. Mostly, volumes of history.

He read, and walked, and wrote a bit, and tried to remember how to breathe.

* * *

It was July when Sorelli came out of the hospital. July, the heat sweltering, and the first time he went to visit her, two days later, she insisted on making him tea, even though she had to lean a crutch to hobble around her small kitchen, and the tray slipped in her hands, one of the cups fell.

He could see it happening in slow motion, could see it, the tea sloshing, the cup falling, and he tried to reach it, tried to grab it in mid-air but it slipped through his fingers and crashed on floor, shards of ceramic splintering and flying.

He flinched, flinched and felt a splinter tear his cheek and saw in his mind’s eye shrapnel tearing through a boat, but he wasn’t there he wasn’t there he didn’t see it, and it was so hard to breathe, so hard to breathe, so hard to breathe—

* * *

He came back to himself, to Sorelli’s face pale as death, her hand warm pressed to his cheek, deep brown eyes searching his. And she whispered for him to keep his head still, as she cleaned the cut on his cheek, but he couldn’t stop trembling, couldn’t stop, his hands and his fingers and his skin, and she pulled him close into a hug, and she was trembling too, her tears damp and warm against his neck.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so sorry I’m sorry…”

* * *

September came. September, and back to Clongowes, and a dormitory of other boys who all looked at him a little askance, looked at him as if he was wrong, something unnatural, a boy cut off from the rest of the world.

September came, and letters from Sorelli, and promises she would visit as often as she could.

September came, and Germany invaded Poland, and Britain declared war.

* * *

Some of the other boys had fathers who went to England to join up. Some of them had older brothers. William’s eldest brother, James, a surgeon in Dublin, went to London and joined the Medical Corps.

It wasn’t long before Raoul wasn’t the only one grieving.

(Would it be easier to live with, if Philippe had died fighting for something greater than himself? If he had died for a reason of his choosing, and not because someone decided he needed to?)

The whispers, the morning that Samuel in the year above, was found to have left for England in the night.

If there was one thing Raoul had always known, it was that Philippe would never want him to fight in a war.

As the other boys whispered, wondering if they, too, should run away and lie about their age, Raoul curled up tighter in his bed, and ached for his brother.

* * *

The first time Sorelli came to visit him, in October that year, she hugged him close, and made him promise that he would not try to join up.

A promise freely given, and as he whispered it, she pulled back and brushed tears from her eyes, and thanked him for it.

* * *

Maybe it should have been strange, that his dead brother’s fiancée would become like a sister to him, but maybe it would have been strange if they were different people, if neither of them had been broken.

(It would have been a hundred times worse, if they had not had each other.)

* * *

His first Christmas without Philippe, William’s mother insisted he join them. “I won’t have you shut up in that big house alone.”

And it was almost more painful, being around people who could still be happy, feeling compelled to smile, though he was grateful for her attempt to make things easier.

He got a journal from Sorelli, a note for him to write his research in it. He gave her a book of Yeats that had been Philippe’s, and a pair of gloves, because the cold made her fingers stiff.

They met for tea on St. Stephen’s Day, and when he saw that she had been crying, it was the first time that he could breathe.

* * *

He turned seventeen on 6 January.

Seventeen, back in Clongowes for the start of the next term, and he wrapped himself up in bed, and feigned illness, and tried to sleep, and remembered Philippe, last year, and the new record player he’d gotten.

The new record player, and he only played it a couple of times before March, before the very thought of playing something made him feel ill.

* * *

In February, he read every review he could find of Sorelli’s return to the stage. And most of them were filled with an account of the “tragedy”, as it was termed, her illness and Philippe’s murder (and his heart dropped every time he saw his brother’s name), but all of them were complimentary of her performance, of how well she came back, and he could not go to see her himself, but he did send her flowers, and a note telling her that he was sure Philippe would be proud.

(They did not often mention his brother. Mostly they talked about music, and books, and his studies, as if by some tacit agreement they recognized the other needed to think about something else, needed to pretend to be normal, but sometimes they did mention him, and writing that note felt like it had to be one of those times. And when her note came back, a simple “thank you”, he knew he made the right decision.)

* * *

He spent Philippe’s first anniversary in bed, and wondered if Philippe had had time to know he was dying, had had time to be frightened, had had time to be in pain, and hoped he had had time for none of those things, hoped that the shrapnel that tore his forehead open robbed him of all ability to know or feel anything.

* * *

Sorelli came to see him the next day, and neither of them spoke, but she hugged him and they had tea that grew cold as they leaned into each other, and it didn’t matter, not a single bit.

(“He would be so proud of you,” she whispered as she left, and the breath that caught in his throat made him whimper.)

* * *

William invited him sailing in June, and the very thought of it made him shiver and gave him nightmares for weeks.

* * *

There are photographs, hundreds of photographs of Philippe, but he struggles to remember the way his eyes would shine right before that smile spread slowly across his face.

That struggle started at seventeen. Seventy-seven years did not diminish it.

* * *

In July he saw Sorelli on stage, and could barely clap through the tears in his eyes to think that it should be Philippe sitting there, and not him.

His first taste of brandy was that night, because he needed to feel _something_ and he gagged as it burned his throat.

* * *

In September he started his last year of school.

In September, he heard stories of boys kissing girls. Heard, at night as he feigned sleep, the familiar shuffling footsteps and creaks of boys creeping into other boys’ beds, the hitching gasps of illicit touches, and curled up tighter in the knowledge that none of them would come to him.

(His own hand was warm beneath his navel, and he wondered, nonetheless, how it would feel.)

Stress relief, and nothing more.

* * *

January 1941, and he turned eighteen and wondered what he would do after school.

What had Philippe wanted him to do?

He couldn’t even begin to guess at it.

It was Sorelli who encouraged him to think of Trinity, of studying history.

“To hell with what the archbishop thinks,” and there was a hardness in her jaw that was becoming familiar at the mention of the hierarchy, a hardness that whispered of her anger at their support for Franco in the civil war, an anger she had shared, he knew, with Philippe.

He made up his mind on what he would do, and with a summer of reading, of preparing, of going to Glasnevin to see Philippe and think about his decision, he started Trinity that September. He joined the Hist and took up debating and a girl called Iseult caught his eye and he caught hers, and they kissed one night near Christmas but he didn’t particularly enjoy it, and it went no further.

* * *

Sorelli went to London, to work as a nurse, and maybe he would have followed her if the thought of crossing the sea did not make him want to vomit.

Still she wrote him every week and he wrote her, and mostly his letters were about history and what he was studying and debates he’d won and the lectures giving by Doctor Sheehy Skeffington that he’d gone to simply because the man was a genius, never mind he never had an inclination to learn French, though Philippe had been fluent. And usually he left the drinking into the small hours out of his letters, though he suspected she knew, and also that he’d taken up smoking when his fingers were too fidgety to stay still, but he included the dancing, and the trips down the country to play football after the late-night drinking sessions, and the cricket, and left out that whenever he kissed girls, he didn’t particularly like it.

He included tales of Daniel that he shared rooms with, and the man’s interest in yet inability to hold a relationship with any girl for more than three weeks.

1942 and he turned nineteen and came top of his year after exams.

* * *

The year was, as years go, uneventful, and if he had fits of depression then nobody needed to know about them, not even Sorelli, not even when it hit him all of a sudden that he was the same age Philippe had been when he was born and it was frightening to think of being responsible for a child, and he danced harder and debated better and plastered on a bigger smile to hide the hollowness in his chest.

And when New Year’s Eve came, and he found himself dancing with a blonde-haired girl who seemed somehow familiar though he was certain he had never seen her before, he kissed her in a moment of impulse as the fireworks lit up the sky and the bell tolled 1943, and it was not terrible, was better than other kisses he had known, and it was only when she whirled out of his arms and away that the breath left his lungs, and he remembered a flash of golden hair, in the crowd at his brother’s funeral.


	3. 3

He remembers spending the first five days of 1943 looking for the girl with the golden hair. He asked anyone he could find who could possibly have seen her, he visited Philippe’s grave each day in case she would turn up there. But there was no sign of her anywhere, as if she had never existed, as if she had simply disappeared.

As if she were a ghost.

He got outrageously drunk on the night of the fifth, and half convinced himself that she _was_ a ghost, that she was the ghost of his sister Lily (almost impossible to think of her as his sister when he never knew her) as she might have been if she had lived, a phantasm come to haunt him, and felt ill at the thought of how he had kissed her.

(Why should he be the one to survive? Four siblings and what gave him the right?)

He turned twenty the next day, and decided that it had all been an invention of his mind. That there had been no girl, and no kiss.

* * *

He remembers Daniel. Daniel, that he shared rooms with in Trinity, and how he had trouble sleeping at night because he was always too warm, even that winter as 1942 became 1943. How he was so tired, and he lost some of his high spirits, started to look grey and gaunt.

It was near the end of January, when Daniel discovered his tuberculosis. And with all the overcrowding, all the hundreds of people on waiting lists to get a bed, he ended up in Newcastle.

Raoul well-remembered Sorelli’s stories of her time in hospital, not that she spoke of it often. But she did speak of the loneliness, and how Philippe’s visits were the highlight of her day (until there were no more visits, and his throat tightened to think of why). Raoul had no intention of ever visiting a sanatorium, of ever being within two miles of one.

But when Daniel entered Newcastle, Raoul went down to visit him, and brought him books.

How could he ever leave him alone in that place?

* * *

In Newcastle Daniel was on a ward with other men, some of them older, many of them the same age and younger.

Raoul wondered, and didn’t dare to ask, how many of them had much chance of surviving.

And then he pushed it from his head, and got Daniel to smile as he relayed the paper he gave at the Hist denouncing Cromwell two nights before, and he didn’t see, until he was at their side, the gaunt young doctor with dark hair and glasses, who seemed slightly familiar from somewhere.

“Raoul,” and Daniel’s voice was hoarse from coughing and laughing, “let me introduce Doctor Browne.”

And it was then that Raoul recognized the medical student he saw visiting a girl, the few times he visited Sorelli in hospital.

(He did not realize it then, how could he have? But that first acquaintance with Noël Browne forged an alliance that would become a friendship, and would carry him through more than fifty years.)

* * *

Doctor Browne had gone to work in England, when Daniel died in June.

A haemorrhage, late at night. A nurse that he had befriended was at his side, and summoned the doctor on call, but it was too late.

The news filtered to Raoul two days later, and he went to Philippe’s grave, and sat there in the misting drizzle, hardly daring to breathe, not thinking very much at all.

If there were tears on his cheeks, there was nobody around to see.

Then he went to the first pub he found, and got so drunk he couldn’t feel a thing.

* * *

He received the Dunbar Ingram Memorial Prize for gaining the highest marks in his year in history, and wrote to Sorelli to tell her. Her reply was full of congratulations for him and his hard work, but he couldn’t feel any of her excitement.

Why should he have lived, when his whole family had died?

Why should he have lived, when Daniel died?

Who decreed that he should always survive?

* * *

In November he shared his bed with a girl for the first and last time. Her name was Andrea and her eyes were the brownest he had ever seen, as deep and dark as clay, and she kissed him and held him and murmured to him in French and he touched her in all the ways he knew he was supposed to touch her, and his heart thudded with her soft gasps in his ear, the sweat beading cold on his skin, but even as she whimpered and sighed into him and he kissed her back with all he had, he felt nothing only hollowness.

* * *

The biggest sensation of the year was two days later when Nicholas Bentham was arrested for engaging in homosexual acts.

He knew Bentham, up to a point. Had debated him (and beaten him) in the Hist and went for drinks with him afterwards and watched him in an amateur production of _Hamlet_. He never would have guessed that Bentham was a homosexual, but he supposed there had been rumours, and something stirred within him, some knowledge, some certainty, that it was not right for a man to be arrested for such a thing. Didn’t half the boys in his year in Clongowes engage in those acts? It didn’t mean that they were or were not, but they did it and did that mean they all ought to be arrested? No!

He couldn’t take any pleasure in what happened to Bentham.

* * *

Maybe they would have debated the laws, but it was a forbidden topic to even think about.

* * *

(He could not prevent himself from wondering. He never enjoyed any of his kisses with girls, did not enjoy Andrea and her whispers to him and ministrations. Would he have enjoyed it if Bentham touched him like that?)

* * *

As the bells tolled 1944, he lay in bed and decided this year would have to be better.

And if not necessarily better, then surely the war would have to end, and Sorelli would come home.

* * *

Turning twenty-one was supposed to be a big moment in any young man’s life. He had no one to make it a big moment, but the Hist at their first debate afterwards poured a bottle of champagne to his name, and Ivo Leighton gave him a bottle of wine and a kiss on each cheek, like an old Frenchman.

In the package that came from Sorelli, was an old photo of Philippe and a new gold pocket watch. _So you don’t lose track of time in the library_ she wrote, and he snorted through something that resembled tears, and swore to treasure it always.

(Little did he know, seventy years from then and more, he would still consult that watch faithfully.)

* * *

On the day that marked the fifth anniversary of Philippe’s death, he wrote Sorelli and took a nip of brandy, and tossed a bouquet of roses into the Irish Sea.

The he went back to his rooms, and listened to Rachmaninoff’s ‘Prelude in C Sharp Minor’ on the record player Philippe had given him for his birthday, once upon a time.

* * *

On 7 June 1944 he read of the Allied invasion of France.

Something seemed to still in the air, the pages of _The Irish Times_ crinkled beneath his fingers as he read it over and over again, letting the words sink in.

Then he smoked two cigarettes, drank a bottle of milk, and caught the bus to Glasnevin.

He lay the paper down before the stone bearing Philippe’s name, and sitting there in the grass told his brother all about the war, and the worry, and the hope that Sorelli might soon come home.

The breeze rustled the pages, and the sun was warm on the back of his neck, and for the first time he felt as if his brother could really hear him.

(The tears dried warm on his face.)

* * *

The year turned, and the world with it.

He gained top marks again in his Junior Sophister year, and successfully defended a motion on Irish unity in the Hist. He wrote Sorelli and developed a taste for fancy wine and after a bad cold gave up smoking. He had two papers published, and took tea once a week with Doctor Skeffington and his wife, and became fluent in French. As 1945 dawned, he felt something like hope in his heart, and when the war in Europe ended in May he went out drinking and didn’t come home for three days and it didn’t matter because he was with friends and _the war was over finally over_. Sorelli wrote him a letter that didn’t make much sense at all about having caught up with an old friend, but wasn’t forthcoming with names or dates or places and it was honestly the most cryptic letter he had ever received from anyone in his life.

On the strength of his marks from final year (tops again, ensuring him a gold medal at graduation) he was accepted to do a doctoral thesis on the abolition of the Irish parliament under the 1800 Act of Union.

* * *

In July, Sorelli came home.

He met her for dinner to celebrate, and there were tears in both of their eyes but neither of them mentioned it.

They refused to speak about the war, to speak about her time in London or Philippe. Instead they had a thoroughly pleasant evening, and went to the theatre after dinner, and she hugged him about ten times and he swore he had never been so happy to see anyone in his life, than to see her looking thin but well and her eyes brighter than he could ever remember.

She admonished him for not looking after himself well enough, but he promised to do better and decided this time to stick to it.

* * *

The next morning, she invited him to visit her in her new apartment, and when he did she met him at the door, and there was something nervous about her, something a little on edge, but she smiles to see him, and said she had someone for him to meet.

For one mad moment, he wondered if she’d gotten married, and just never told him.

(In hindsight, his mad moment was not too far off the mark.)

She led him into the parlour, and there sat a girl with golden hair who reminded him of New Year’s Eve 1942, and of Philippe’s funeral, and she turned to him with big blue eyes that pierced straight through to his heart, and it was as if he had known her all his life, as she held out her hand, and he took it, and kissed it.

And her name was Christine Daaé. And she was Sorelli’s lover.

(He told them he hoped they would be very happy together, and meant it with every fibre of his heart.)


	4. 4

He met Christine Daaé, and suddenly, the world felt right.

* * *

Time travel.

Time. Travel.

He knew what time was, knew the way it could stretch out. Knew the shape and the weight and the feel of it, and the importance of keeping track of it. Knew the ticking of his watch, and the shifting of the hands on the clock face, and how there never seems to be enough of it, not when he needs it most.

(Knew that if Philippe had had more of it, the world would be brighter.)

And he knew travel. He _had_ travelled, to an extent. To Brittas Bay and Connemara and walked through the Wicklow Mountains and he had been all through Galway city on foot and had once, for a gamble, ridden from Bray to Athlone and he won a hundred pounds for his efforts.

(And he knew what travel might be, for people who are not him, who do not close their eyes and see the shattered remnants of a boat on the water.)

But time and travel together, time travel, traveling through time backwards or forwards—well. How could that be anything but the realm of fantasy?

(If it were possible, did it mean he could see Philippe again? Even from the distance?)

(Even a moment would be enough, to know he is out there, somewhere.)

* * *

He is not afraid to admit now, over a distance of almost seventy-two years (near the end of his life), that he did, for a time, think both Sorelli and Christine ought to be committed to St Brendan’s. The very notion of time travel was simply ludicrous, and for Christine to say she was coming from February 2017. February 2017! In July 1945! Either they needed to be committed, or something had finally cracked in his brain.

(If he had any belief in time travel, any belief in the possibility of such a thing, he might have asked her if he was alive where she was coming from. But somehow the thought of his living to be ninety-four years old seemed equally as unfathomable as her coming from February 2017, so he didn’t ask. It was later before he learned that she would not have told him, even if he had.)

She came to see him, just the other day, right after she got back from 1945, and she had that impish grin that she gets sometimes and it always means there has either been mischief afoot or is about to be, and there has never been a time he has not loved the sight of that grin. And she didn’t say anything, not for a little while, just wore that grin while she made tea and he crossed out a couple of sentences in the introduction to her thesis so he could suggest she re-write them, and wondered, idly, what trouble she’d gotten up to this time.

“You were such a child,” she said, and that was when he looked up to find her still grinning, and it dawned on him what she meant, and where she had been.

“I was twenty-two!”

And her eyes twinkled. “My point stands.”

* * *

The first time he saw her disappear. _That_ was when he came to believe her.

And even then he was not fully convinced that he had not imagined it, that it was not some elaborate trick. Sorelli and her years of the theatre, she was bound to know all sorts of stage tricks. And it was only when she laughed, and offered to pour him a stiff brandy, after he had searched behind every curtain and sofa in the small apartment, that he realized it was true.

One stiff brandy became three, and he slept wrapped in blankets on the very sofa he’d searched behind.

* * *

The remains of that summer were the best he had had in a long time.

The best he had had since Philippe was alive.

There was the theatre. There was dancing, often just with Sorelli, but sometimes with Christine. And he rapidly learned that the Christines that came often varied, always older than the one who claimed to be from February 2017, but varying in the amount of age. The first time he met a Christine who looked older than Sorelli, she claimed to be from 2025, and that was very nearly more than he could countenance.

They went to Brittas together, he and Sorelli. And he didn’t swim because the very thought of stepping foot in the water made him break out in a cold sweat, but she did and he spent the whole time pretending to be reading the paper, but really he couldn’t take in a word of it for watching her to be sure she was safe.

They took trips around Dublin, around the streets and out into the mountains and walked along little lanes not saying very much at all. And it was then that he decided that it didn’t matter much who or what Christine was. What mattered was that Sorelli was happy, happier than he could remember ever seeing her, and that filled his heart with light.

And an affection, towards the girl with the golden hair for whom time meant no bound.

* * *

He can’t remember when, precisely, it was he realized Sorelli must have known about Christine’s time travel to be so unsurprised about it. But he does remember asking her, one night in September (or maybe it was October) how they had met. And so she told him the story, of being a little girl, and hearing a rattle in the other room, and thinking a bird had come down the chimney only to find another little girl, totally naked.

She told him of that little girl becoming her best friend as she grew up, and being the one to first persuade her to take up acting. And how they didn’t see each other very often, when she and Philippe were together, but how Christine was a constant support to her when she was in Steevens’. That they fell out of touch (and there was something about her eyes that kept him from wondering how or why) and found each other again in London, the day the war ended in Europe. And that was when they accepted they loved each other.

“Did Philippe know?” Know what, exactly, Raoul was not sure he was asking, and his voice was very soft. Something about it felt necessary, felt like the most important thing in the world to know, and when she nodded, a knot inside of him that he had not known was there, loosened.

“I think he suspected.” And her voice was faint. “And he liked her very much.”

* * *

Sorelli took up acting again almost as soon as she returned. And though it was years since she had been on an Irish stage, the knowledge that she was back created a stir that caught Raoul by surprise. There were interviews in papers, photographs taken of her looking haughty and elegant, interviews done with her on the radio. She answered only what she felt like answering, referenced only past events that she felt like referencing, and when she talked about Philippe, which was rarely, she said very little, only that yes, they had been engaged, yes, she wished to see those who had planted the bomb on his boat brought to justice, and yes, she had spent a year in hospital with tuberculosis in her bones and the whispered rumours of her disappearance from public life were entirely inaccurate.

(It had not escaped Raoul’s notice that her return brought a flurry of rumours that she had secretly had a child with Philippe, though all those who questioned her were too discreet to raise that question directly.)

(The thought of the possibility, however untrue he knew it to be, that there might have been a child, made something deep inside Raoul ache.)

To deflect the attention from her private life, she joined the Post-Sanatoria League, and her anger over the 1945 Public Health Bill was very real and very publicized. Instead of taking her bow at the end of _Wife to James Whelan_ , she denounced the Bill as neo-Fascism, with its provision for forcible inspections and institutionalization.

The play’s run was cut short, but Sorelli’s speech was featured in all the papers, and Raoul couldn’t help the burst of pride in his chest.

(The Bill was eventually, quietly, dropped, and together they went out for drinks to celebrate.)

* * *

His research, and following Sorelli’s career, took up the best part of his time. Though he knew nothing of the theatre, he would help her learn her lines for plays and radio dramas, taking on any role she asked of him in the quietness of her parlour. If Christine was with them (and he found it easier to think of her as being _with them_ as opposed to _in their time_ or any other way of framing it) he would slip away earlier and leave them to be together, though sometimes Sorelli would insist on his joining them for dinner.

(He supposed that he should have found it strange, two women being involved with each other, but if there were male homosexuals why could there not be female ones too? Though homosexual felt like too restricted of a term, because while Sorelli loved Christine he never doubted that she loved Philippe too, and so he often found it best to not think about things.)

(Besides, Sorelli was of the theatre. And members of the theatre were always known for their unusual tastes.)

She made several short films in 1946 while he composed papers to present to the different societies, and one longer film that necessitated a trip to London. He missed her fiercely while she was gone, and found himself at dances he had not attended since she had returned.

It was not that they saw each other everyday as it was, but the knowledge that she was there and he _could_ see her, if he wanted, was all the assurance he needed. And for her to be gone—

(He would never tell her, just how much he missed her when she was away.)

But there was his own work, and there were articles to write, on the teachers’ strike, and the new political party Clann na Poblachta.

(He could not in good conscience join Clann na Poblachta, not in the knowledge that some of these men, maybe Seán MacBride himself, had likely been behind Philippe’s death. But he could write about them, and what their existence said about an Ireland who had had the same government for fourteen years.)

* * *

It ought to have been a shock, meeting Christine’s father. But he supposed, when it came to time travel, that he was past being truly shocked. Its very existence was shocking enough, and it made an odd sort of sense, even to him as a surprised twenty-four year old, for her father to have been a time traveller as well.

That Christine was, herself, twenty-five visiting them, and her father only twenty-seven, was much more surprising.

That her father had last seen her at five years old yet managed to take this in his stride very nearly did make Raoul’s head spin.

That Christine _at the age of five_ was about to appear in Sorelli’s kitchen was the part where he felt himself start to crack.

No one else seemed to understand how ludicrous this was, that Christine at twenty-five was about to be talking to herself at five and the world would _not_ implode as a result was, as far as he was concerned, beyond any reasonable limits of anything.

She ushered he and Sorelli and her father, Alex, out the door, and mostly Alex and Sorelli talked while he lay on the grass looking up at the clouds wondering what, exactly, his life had become.

And afterwards, when Christine, adult Christine, came out to find them and tell them they could come back inside, that the child version of her was gone, he had a brandy and decided that the list of things it was best not to wonder over was getting very long indeed.

* * *

When, exactly, he realized that Christine must have known Philippe would die, must have known it every time she met him and every time she met Sorelli before it happened, he cannot remember.

But he remembers the realizing, the way it drove the air out of his lungs, to think that she had known, and had not tried to stop it.

(She could not have stopped it. He knows that now, knew that then, even, some part of him, knew it like the way she would never tell him pieces of the future.)

He pushed it from his mind, the very question.

(It remained there at the back, ready to creep up on him.)

* * *

The shock of the October 1947 by-elections, when Clann na Poblachta snatched two seats from Fianna Fáil without so much as blinking, distracted him from his thesis for a whole month. It was enough to draw Sorelli back from a trip to London, and for the Hist to dedicate three weeks of debates and hastily-written papers to it. His own contributions, on the necessity for political change, were applauded, especially with his criticism of the republican elements within the party, and its links to the IRA.

He could not deny the attractiveness of its social policies, and its intention to stamp out TB, and nor did he want to.

If it had not been coupled with the rest—

And when the general election was called for February, he revised all his hastily-written papers, and had them published.

* * *

It was January when he read that Browne, _Doctor_ Browne, the same Browne that Daniel introduced him to in Newcastle five years earlier, was standing in Dublin South-East for Clann. And while he could not bring himself to join the party, Raoul knew without question he would vote for Browne.

That the man had had TB himself, and had the support of Sorelli’s friends in the Post-Sanatoria League, and was adamant that if elected he would do all he could to fight the disease all over the country, were reasons enough.

(And if Raoul thought of the grave that held his own parents, that held his two sisters, thought of Philippe and how terrified he had been when he heard Sorelli had it in her bones, then that was for him to know.)

It was Sorelli who told him that she had known Browne, to an extent, when she was in hospital, that he had been visiting the girl who had become his wife, and that Philippe had liked him. Sorelli who looked him dead in the eye and said “we’re getting him elected”, and formed their own campaign of speeches and articles and letters to the newspapers. And it felt like something _real_ , something with meaning that they could do that was not just debating in the Hist, not just making speeches at the end of plays. And when Clann’s film _Our Country_ was banned from the cinemas, Raoul found a way to have it shown on the wall just outside Trinity, for the city to see. And Christine chewed her lip with a knowing look in her eye, and told him the times ahead would be very exciting indeed.

(He told her not to be so cryptic, and she told him to invoke Philippe’s memory in his next speech with Sorelli.)

(And in the count centre after the election, when Christine was making notes she would have to leave behind when she went back to her own time, at the moment it became known that they had done it, that they had gotten Browne elected, as the crowd cheered he swept Sorelli into his arms and swung her around, and she laughed like he had never heard her laugh before, and even now that laugh echoes in his ears.)


	5. 5

He never was one for scrapbooking, for collecting together odd bits of articles and things. That had, once, been Philippe’s hobby, and Raoul still has journals and diaries full of yacht racing results that are ninety years old now, news from the old society columns, births and deaths and marriages and parties. All this old stuff that’s no good to anyone anymore, only for memories.

(The names of boats and people mean almost nothing to him, meant little to him even when Philippe was alive and these things were being collected, but sometimes he still traces the worn leather bindings, just to remember that his brother had touched these once, too.)

(There are, of course, a great many pieces of Sorelli. There is a journal dedicated solely to her, to photos of the two of them together, and reviews of the plays she was in, and interviews she had given. And though so much of these scraps have never meant much to Raoul, the scraps of Sorelli are ones he has always treasured.)

He was never one for scrapbooking, but some niggling thing, in that cold damp spring of 1948, made him think that he should be keeping pieces of these things.

So there are clippings of the _Irish Times,_ of the _Irish Independent,_ of Browne and the Clann and the government they were part of. And a letter from Browne, in that terrible scrawled handwriting, thanking him for his help.

(And he still remembers, on the day he heard Browne had become Minister for Health on his _very first day_ as a TD, how he thought of Christine’s comment that things would be exciting, and knew that this was exactly what she meant.)

* * *

He had never done much with Philippe’s room, with his things. Had never much wanted to touch it. Even his study he had left as it was, and did his own work in the small library that had been their father’s.

It was Sorelli who, with a little gentle prodding, persuaded him to tidy through the papers, to restore some order to the chaos, and use the study for himself.

They did it together, the day after his ninth anniversary. Sat down together, and filed the papers into boxes for the attic, made a bundle of things to burn. They spoke little, because what good were words there? And when his eyes prickled he pretended it was the dust, and when they stumbled across a drawer full of letters in her handwriting, she glanced at him, and he squeezed her fingers, and they agreed, silently, for her to take them.

There were letters in his writing too, or, his writing as it was, when he was sixteen and younger. Some of them from when he was much younger, with poor spelling and barely any form to the letters, and the thought that Philippe had kept them, as carefully as he kept Sorelli’s—

He went downstairs to make tea, the air in the room suddenly crushing, and when he got back upstairs, Sorelli had them all neatly arranged for him, with a bundle of photographs she’d found, of him as a child

“It’s better to keep them,” she said, and her eyes were damp.

* * *

They got through the study that day, and she helped him move in his own papers and books. And that night they slept curled up together in his bed, because neither of them wanted to be alone, and Christine was, presumably, in her own time. And it was better, waking the next morning, with Sorelli there, knowing what they had done, and what they had still to do that day. Better, and easier to breathe.

And they tackled Philippe’s room that day, that still smelled of his cologne and the cigars he had smoked, even through the dust. Sorelli threw open the windows to let the air in, and pulled the sheets off the bed to burn.

“Sometimes a purge is necessary,” she declared, and he found himself agreeing with her.

He almost wavered over Philippe’s clothes, and in the end decided to burn almost them all. There were shirts that had never been worn, and those he took for himself, and the coats, a couple of cravats that had not been moth-eaten, and the new suit, still in its protective cover, that Philippe had decided to hold over until Sorelli’s release from hospital. Philippe would have considered it a crime to burn something so fine, and though it was nine years out of fashion, Raoul decided to hell with it. He could have it tailored to fit himself, and besides, historians are allowed to dress with eccentricity.

There were cufflinks, too, that he took for himself, and tie pins, and the bottle of cologne. But the rest could go, and Sorelli helped him, though what to do with the room itself, he had not decided.

Re-decorate it in case he should ever have guests, he supposed.

(In later years, instead of considering it Philippe’s room, he would come to think of it first as Christine’s.)

* * *

There was a dance in May, that he could not avoid no matter how much he wanted to. His dilemma was whether or not to bring a girl, but he didn’t want to bring any girl that might think he had feelings for her that he did not, or might have expectations of him. He had long since learned that romance was not a field he was destined to have much success in, but he could not think of any girl who would make the night bearable.

Sorelli, he supposed, but she was in London, negotiating the contract for a film, and he could not expect her to come back just to save him from being bored stiff.

A solution, as it happened, presented itself on the day of the dance, in the form of Christine.

It did not often happen, that Christine arrived in Dublin when Sorelli was out of the country, but it did on occasion, and he had learned not to be surprised by the woman who might appear naked in his house, or who might knock at his door wearing the oddest assembly of clothes he had ever seen. Even then, not yet three years after meeting her, he had become quite accustomed to making her tea.

He had also learned to keep a supply of ladies clothes, tailored to her measurements.

But she arrived, dressed in clothes that he knew must have come from Sorelli’s stock for her, and he asked her if she might be staying long, and she said she wasn’t sure but she suspected a few hours. And so he invited her to accompany him to the dance, to save them both from boredom, and she agreed.

This was a younger Christine than he was used to, closer to his own age, from January 2018, and there was something a little watery in her smile to see him, but he had learned, too, not to ask questions. So he asked her, simply, if she was feeling alright, and she said the day she had come from was a good friend’s birthday, but he was almost ten months dead, and she was just finding it a little difficult.

That, at least, was something he was familiar with.

Then she asked him about Browne ( _Flash_ Browne, as some were calling him, for his propensity for racing around), and something caught in his chest to think of the man, a new deep affection, and he got to tell her all about his plan of action, the hospital beds he was freeing up for TB patients and the new hospitals he was planning to build, and the map in his office that he had seen when he called in on him, with colour-coded pins for different stages of progress in different areas, and as he rambled he didn’t notice the slight tear in her eye, hidden by her smile.

“You’re very fond of him, aren’t you?” and her smile could almost be called knowing.

“He’s the second-greatest man I’ve ever known.”

(The first, of course, went without saying.)

They talked about her thesis, too, for a little while, in the vaguest discussion he had ever had about a thesis which completely left out all names and dates and places, and all he knew by the end was that it was about some sort of scandal involving a high-profile Minister, and the Catholic Church.

Whether the Minister was in the present government or not, she refused to be drawn on.

(He suspected it was MacBride, if only because he could not bear MacBride.)

(He was somewhat mollified, when she praised his own thesis, or the work that was in the process of becoming his thesis, and decided he would find out in good time all about hers.)

* * *

Sorelli was delighted, upon her return from London, to hear that he had enjoyed the dance with Christine, that he had not drunk himself into a stupor, and they had, the both of them, had a good time.

He decided, too, that it was high-time he confess to having kissed Christine, on that New Years’ Eve as the bells tolled 1943, and though he was a little concerned that she might think any differently of him, she hugged him and told him not to be foolish, and gave him the advice he would carry with him all the rest of his life.

“It’s best not to dwell on the fingerprints she’s left in our pasts.”

* * *

1948 was, on the whole, a good year. Certainly a good deal better than some of the others he’d had. His weekly meetings with Browne, to see what articles he could write for the papers this time, were only one of the high points, and though it meant extra work on top of his thesis, he enjoyed every minute of it. Sorelli’s soaring career was a constant joy, and he went to the theatre to watch her every chance he could, and to the cinema when her films were playing, and he wondered, when she rejected the offer to work in America, whether she maybe should have taken the opportunity, but the defiance was clear in every line of her, and she declared she could do more useful work exactly where she was.

He did wonder, a bit, in October with the repeal of the External Relations Act, what Philippe would think of Ireland finally being redefined as a Republic, and decided that he would, in fact, probably be relieved.

The most worrying time came in December with the month Browne spent in hospital thanks to his TB flaring up, and though he came through it with the admonishment to not work quite so hard, Raoul had to admit that he had been very nearly frightened for him.

(Though he felt a little privileged to be one of only a small group of people to actually know.)

(How Browne’s wife, Phyllis, must have felt, he could not imagine, but Sorelli made a point of visiting her just as often as she could.)

* * *

They toasted the end of the year together, he and Sorelli, and decided, facing into 1949, to make it the very best they could.

(Neither of them mentioned it, but they were both thinking, that she had spent this night ten years earlier confined to a hospital bed.)


	6. 6

On the day that it was ten years since Philippe died, Raoul and Sorelli went together to his grave.

They brought him flowers, lilies and orchids. And neither of them spoke a word, because what words could possibly fit?

Ten years. A whole _decade_ since Philippe was ripped away from them. How could any words capture all of that?

He could still feel it, the way the world stopped turning when they told him the news.

(Even now, even more than seventy years after that day, he’s not sure when it started again, only that it did.)

The tears came, but he didn’t turn away, not even when they blurred his vision so much he could not read Philippe’s name on the headstone.

Sorelli’s hand snaked into his, and squeezed his fingers tight.

(There were tears on her cheeks, too, the watery light of March sparkling through them.)

* * *

They had made it known that they did not want to be disturbed. They would carry on as normal the next day, but for those twenty-four hours, those hours no one else could understand, the world would have to stop.

She went home with him, to the big house in Malahide, and they sat before the fire in the parlour, sharing wine and memories. And they laughed, and cried, and looked at old photographs, of Philippe with Sorelli, and Philippe with Raoul, and Philippe on his own caught in moments at parties and dances and functions, always elegant. And though there was no colour to the photos, if Raoul squinted he could see it, the sparkle in those blue eyes, the thick blond of Philippe’s hair combed back, something sternly defiant about him.

(He was only defiant when he had to be, only stern when he needed to be, and most of the time he simple _was_ , gentle and careful and at ease. And through all that time, through all these years stretching on since, Raoul has never stopped feeling as if something was stolen from him.)

When, eventually, they had talked themselves out, they went up to bed and curled up together, neither of them wanting to be alone, and it made it easier to sleep, hollowed out in the darkness with hearts so full of feeling, knowing there was someone else, too, feeling exactly the same way.

* * *

The next day Sorelli was back rehearsing a play.

Raoul sat down and wrote a very long letter.

He should have been making the final edits to his thesis, but no matter how he tried to frame his thoughts around the Act of Union, they wouldn’t come. All he could think of was Philippe and how, after ten years, what he remembered best of his brother was the marble paleness of his face as he lay dead, and he often thought of the halo, that the blood must have formed around his head before they pulled him from the water.

So he wrote a letter, for publication in _The Irish Times_ , all about Philippe, and how he had stood for doing the right thing, how, in spite of their being descended at one time from British aristocracy, Philippe fully supported the Free State government, and how, after ten years, it was tantamount to a criminal act in itself that no one had ever been found or even suspected of his murder.

He typed the letter, and addressed it in an envelope, then took a swig of whiskey and went for a long walk.

* * *

The letter was published a week later, but he wasn’t conscious to see it.

* * *

His appendix.

He doesn’t remember much of it, and has long-since decided that to be for the best. But he does remember the terrible pain, deep in his side and his stomach. He remembers not being able to eat a thing, not being able to keep down water, remembers not being able to write and being too hot and too cold and so tired he could hardly keep his eyes open though sleep was impossible.

He remembers Sorelli, her face pinched and pale, taking one look at him, and bundling him into a taxi.

* * *

He knows, more so than remembers, that there were two surgeries. And knows, more so than remembers, that the infection deep inside him was almost too far gone.

* * *

Sorelli was there, every time he woke, whispering softly to him, her eyes rimmed red.

* * *

If he had reached out, if he had been able to lift his hand, his fingers would have brushed the fabric of Philippe’s coat.

(If he could have made his brother stay…)

* * *

(It was only afterwards, that he heard the stir it had caused, when Browne strode through the ward to see him.)

* * *

Those early days in the hospital, of fever and pain and morphine, remain, to this day, mostly indistinct impressions. Of voices, and hands, gentle touches, the brush of lips over his forehead, light fingertips and fingers threaded between his. The glimpses of eyes, hazel, and blue, and brown. White, a great deal of white.

When he came back to himself, it was Sorelli at his side. And his eyes were too heavy to keep open for long, but when he tried to speak, she pressed a finger to his lips to shush him.

“Don’t you _ever_ do that to me again,” she whispered, those dark eyes burning, boring into his, each word carefully spaced for him to understand. He nodded dumbly, groping for some understanding of what, exactly, had happened, and she nodded back at him. “Good.” Then she drew back, and the light glanced off the tears shining in her eyes. “Wouldn’t know what I’d do if I lost you.”

Her voice was groggy, but neither of them mentioned it.

* * *

He was given to understand that he had been very ill indeed.

* * *

He was sitting up when Browne came to see him the next day, carrying a bundle of newspapers. “Keep you from getting bored,” he said, in that soft but adamant way of his, and carefully opened the top paper to pass to him. “It’s quite a stir you’ve caused.”

Raoul glanced down at the paper he’d been handed. _The Irish Times,_ with a date of 23 March, opened to the Letters to the Editor.

All he could see reference to was _De Chagny’s letter of 18 March_ …

When he looked back up at Browne, he found Noël smiling. “General MacEoin is convening an inquiry.”

* * *

An inquiry into the handling of Philippe’s death.

After ten years, an _inquiry._

* * *

He was never alone too long during his stay in hospital. Sorelli came every day, Browne every other day. Doctor Sheehy-Skeffington, whom he had long since come to know simply as Skeff, brought him the latest Trinity happenings, Doctor Wilkinson his supervisor, came to discuss his thesis. Christine came twice, once from 2020, once from 2027, and was just as vague as ever in telling him anything about the future, which was something of a relief.

It was almost a novelty, for someone to treat him _perfectly normally_.

He was still confined to bed when they came to interview him for the inquiry, but by then his head was fully his own again, and his allowance of morphine had been reduced. He fancied, afterwards, that he gave a good account of himself, and of Philippe.

* * *

When he was finally allowed home, in early April, it was under strict orders to rest, not to do any lifting lest it burst his stitches, and to come straight back if there was any bleeding.

Sorelli made it known, in that tone that forbade questions, that he would be confined to the bottom floor for the time being, that she would stay with him, and he was not to lift a finger.

He decided life was too short to argue, and she set him up in an old guest room that she had readied with Christine’s help.

With the strain of coming home, he slept soundly.

* * *

Christine herself came to see him the next day, a younger Christine, one of the youngest he had met until then. Her face was blanched pale, and her eyes gave the impression of her having been crying, the blue dark and shining against the bloodshot red.

He was dozing after lunch, when she crawled into bed beside him, and lay her head on his shoulder.

“When are you coming from?” his voice was hoarse with tiredness, her face damp against his neck as he wrapped his arms around her.

“May 2017.” And then, “Sorelli told me you almost died.” Her voice cracked on the last word, and he swallowed.

“But I didn’t.”

She didn’t answer, but she pressed herself closer, and when it jarred his healing wound, he swallowed down the groan.

(He doesn’t remember, because he was asleep, Sorelli finding them after, Christine asleep against him, and kissing both of their foreheads, and tucking the blankets tighter around them.)

(He doesn’t remember, but he smiled as she smoothed back his hair.)

* * *

(“Which grave would you have buried me in?” It seemed important to know, important to have some idea, and Sorelli swallowed and looked away for a long minute before looking back to him, her mouth creased. “Philippe’s.” Her voice was soft and low, and the faint twitch of her lips belied the heaviness in her eyes. “Couldn’t have either of you being alone.”)


	7. 7

He was never used to sharing his bed with people. It was something he had only done a handful of times, with false-start romances that could never go anywhere, and those times neither he nor Sorelli could stand to be alone.

In the long recovery from his illness, sharing a bed with both Christine and Sorelli made it all bearable.

He did not have the words to express it, how safe he felt between them. He was still so tired, so cold from the blood loss and the weight loss and the strain of his ordeal, and it came about because of that cold in his bones, and because neither of them wanted to be away from him for long.

It was easy to sleep, easy to breathe, knowing he was not alone in the darkness.

* * *

It was Christine who saved his thesis. Christine who, after he showed her how to use the typewriter, painstakingly typed it and all his corrections. (He did not ask her what they had in her own time, that meant she didn’t know how to change ink reels.) It was the longest she had ever stayed, a whole entire month, and when he pressed her on how long she would be missing from her own time, she told him it was impossible to know.

(Later he would learn that it had only been a week.)

But she typed his thesis, and checked his bibliography, and his tables and table of contents, and ensured that it was the best it could be.

(On the day, months later, that he passed his viva, he kissed Sorelli with sheer delight in her stead, and she laughed into his mouth.)

(“I’ll be sure to pass on your message,” and she winked with a grin that bordered on indecent.)

* * *

By early May he was up and about in a limited way, and by the end of the month he was almost wholly himself. His thesis submitted and waiting for review, the inquiry into Philippe’s murder still in progress, Christine back in her own time and Sorelli back working on a play.

So much done, and so much waiting, and he just couldn’t _settle_ , something itching in his blood.

It wasn’t anxiety, it was restlessness.

(And if there was anxiety, beneath the surface, he could deny it to the world.)

So on the day Noël Browne came to him, and told him he needed to get out of the house, he was more than willing to accept any suggestion of what to do.

“I could do with a good man to write a report,” Browne said, and it was on the tip of Raoul’s tongue to argue that there must be plenty of good report writers in the Department of Health, but Noël fixed him with that look that meant he would not take no for an answer, and Raoul decided it would probably be good for him to have something to do with himself.

So he agreed.

And learned that they did not call him Flash Browne for nothing.

* * *

He was never so afraid for his life traveling with someone, than in a car driven by Noël Browne at breakneck speed.

Surely cars were never meant to go that fast.

* * *

In the space of twelve days they toured the country, hospital to building site to sanatorium to hospital, and while Browne asked all the necessary questions, Raoul kept track of the answers, the statistics and progress. By the end of it he swore he would never travel with the man again. Philippe had been a fast driver too, but he had nothing on Browne.

(He swore it, and would renege on it, many times in the future.)

Still, he survived. And felt more alive, felt more _real,_ than he had since his illness. And the compiled report needed extracts taken from it and articles written for the newspapers, and it kept him occupied for the best part of the summer, enough to drive that shiver from his fingers.

* * *

In September came the report of the inquiry.

For two days, he could not bring himself to read it, could not bring himself to go out and buy a newspaper, lest it be referenced there.

Sorelli came to see him, her face blanched pale, and neither of them spoke of it, just sat by the fire, and clung on to each other’s hands.

When, at last, he did open it, it was after smoking two cigarettes, and lighting a third.

* * *

Seosamh Breathnach.

The man who murdered Philippe was named Seosamh Breathnach.

* * *

He had been a member of the IRA, but it had not been IRA-directed.

Philippe’s prominence, his English blood, marked him for death.

* * *

Seosamh Breathnach, and he had brought in guns from Germany under the name of Joseph Buquet, so De Valera had him arrested, and he died, mysteriously, in prison.

* * *

Dead. Philippe’s murderer was dead.

* * *

Raoul went out, and got outrageously drunk, and woke the next morning with torn knuckles and an aching jaw.

He rolled over, and wept.

* * *

He doesn’t remember very much at all, of that winter.

He thinks, perhaps, that is for the best.

* * *

He does remember leaning into Sorelli, as the clock tolled midnight at the dawning of 1950.

He remembers his graduation, being addresssed as _Doctor_ De Chagny, and his photograph in _The Irish Times_.

He remembers the bottle of wine Browne brought him as a celebration gift, and the cake his wife had baked.

He remembers swinging Christine around in a dance and the way she laughed in his ear.

He remembers that spring was a good deal better than the winter that had gone before it, and he was writing articles and researching essays, and the Department of History had taken him on to lecture.

* * *

When he went to Philippe’s grave on his anniversary that year, the very air felt different, as of by knowing, or knowing as close as it was possible to know, what had happened, that something had been dispelled, some tightness deep in his chest.

Something dispelled, or else that he was too tired to feel the keenness of it any longer.

Afterwards he went for a very long walk, and as darkness fell, and he looked out on the rippling waves of the Irish Sea, he wondered, exactly, how cold the water would be.

* * *

To travel through time. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

* * *

Breathnach’s name was in the Book of Condolences from Philippe’s funeral.

Did he go, just to see the grief he had wrought?

* * *

He hid it from Sorelli, the emptiness inside.

It would only have upset her to know.

* * *

It was Browne, in the end, that pulled him out of it.

Not intentionally, though he’s sure the man would have found a way to do so if he had known how he felt.

What was called, in the newspapers just after Easter, a “slight indisposition” on the part of the Minister for Health was really a severe relapse of tuberculosis.

When the fever of pneumonia passed away, Raoul went to see him, and through all the years since has never been able to forget how pale Noël was, how much less imposing, when he was confined to bed, his glasses on the locker beside him. And they talked, in hushed voices, about the Department and about politics, and about Trinity, and there was something solemn about it, but Browne didn’t have the breath for anything more than a hushed voice.

It was the strong doses of the new drug streptomycin, that fought the disease away.

* * *

There were the whispers, all through that summer, even when he was back in public and in the papers, that Browne was considering stepping down, for the sake of his health, and his young family. That all of the things he had pushed through, that Raoul had written about, the new hospitals and the sanatoria and the blood transfusion service and the BCG vaccine and the policies on everything from nurses’ pay to the quality of the medical service, that it was all more than enough for a man of frail health to have done.

Browne conceded it was a possibility, and then with that slight smile said, “one last thing.”

The free Mother and Child Health Service.

* * *

Raoul wondered if, had there been such a service before, his mother and sisters would have lived.

* * *

Sometimes, with all he had done, it was easy to forget that Browne was a year younger than Sorelli.

* * *

Mostly, Raoul kept his attention on his research, and on Robert Emmet’s rebellion in 1803. It kept his thoughts in order, and kept his hands steady, and there was no room for anxious grief and anger when he was focused on the facts of what had happened, and interpreting what it all might mean about people.

The structure gave him substance.

That both the Medical Association and the Church were unhappy with the Mother and Child Scheme was something he was only distantly aware of.

Thinking on it would mean thinking on the things that he was researching to try to avoid.

* * *

He played a lot of cards, to keep his hands busy and his thoughts occupied, and he accompanied Sorelli to two after parties, partly to give her cover from the actors trying to draw her attention.

When they were pictured together in the newspaper, he almost snorted.

Perhaps he would have done, if it had not also been implied that he was replacing Philippe.

* * *

The very suggestion was ludicrous, that he could replace Philippe. And he knew Sorelli did not see him like that. But still it was out there, implied more than said, to circle in the mind of a public that did not know him, that knew Sorelli by reputation only and knew nothing of her kindness, of her gentleness, of the fiery anger behind her eyes and how she could laugh as if the world was ending. A public that thought it owned something of her, that it had helped to make her renowned, when she was acclaimed as the greatest actress gracing the stages of Dublin.

The greatest Irish actress on the silver screen.

That it would say such things, that she was using him solely to replace his brother—

* * *

In another world, she would have been his sister-in-law, but this world would never understand.

* * *

She looked deep into his eyes, her gaze burning hazel, hands squeezing his tight, and said, “dance as if none of them are watching,” and those words buried themselves deep in his bones.

* * *

It was March when he knew it was all about to come apart. March 1951, and Noël told him that the Bishops were trying to topple the Scheme, and MacBride was out for his blood.

Raoul looked him dead in the eye and asked, “How can I help?”

(Help meant a campaign of letters, of arranging meetings and scrutinizing documents and visits to a theologian in Maynooth. And help meant, when MacBride demanded Noël’s resignation as Minister, going with him to the office in the Custom House, and destroying every document that might be used against him. As a historian it pained him to do so, but as a friend it was all he could do.)

(With Noël’s permission, he smuggled out several documents, and has hidden them ever since. And when the day comes that he dies, he has willed them to Christine, these documents he has never told her of. He fancies they will be a pleasant surprise.)

* * *

The news broke that Noël had resigned, and it came back to Raoul, his conversation with Christine, of three years earlier. About her thesis, and a scandal between a high-profile Minister and the Catholic Church that brought down a government.

And he knew, with a certainty beyond words, that it could be nothing but this.

* * *

(Sorelli phoned him from London. “We’ve got to do something.” And he took a drag of his cigarette, and sighed, and said, “It’s already too late.”)


	8. 8

Christine came and stayed a week and proved that even in such a terrible time of darkness, there could be sparks of lights.

* * *

She was one of the younger Christines, and with those he never knew what to talk about. There was no point referring to things they had done together, things they had been through, because she would have no memory of them. For her they would not have happened yet, and it was this point of disconnection, of trying to find the pieces that fit.

When he realized this was the youngest Christine he had met, one for whom May 1945 and loving Sorelli had not yet happened, it was a jolt to his system.

And he knew, knew from talking to older Christines, knew from Sorelli, that something had happened, something neither of them had ever specified, and he did not feel comfortable prying. But he knew that until May 1945 happened, until Christine had been through that, that they had not spoken to each other in years.

That it must have pained them both terribly, he was sure of.

So he didn’t pry. And when Sorelli rushed back from London after Browne’s resignation, when she came to see him and got herself in trouble with the church and the press for defending Noël and his Scheme, Christine hid away in the room that had been Philippe’s, and he did not question her, or mention her to Sorelli. Though he did not miss the flicker of sadness in her face.

It was her own older self, that insisted it had to be this way, and who was he to defy that?

And though he could hardly be happy after what happened, after Noël stepping down and the things that were being said in the press and in the Dáil, it gave him an odd sense of satisfaction, to see her so enthralled, so fascinated.

If what she needed was to be fascinated, then he would do all he could to help her.

* * *

It would have been so easy, to fall back into his old ways, if it were not for Christine. But while he smoked he stayed away from the pubs, stayed away from alcohol. Christine being with him and being bound by the rules of time from speaking to Sorelli meant Christine was his responsibility, and he would not have her neglected to go out and get himself into trouble.

So while it was tempting, to go out and get into a fight and rage against what had happened, against the church and against the government and against MacBride, he held on, and made sure to breathe slowly, and smoked enough cigarettes that he felt faintly ill. And when she returned to her time, to 2016 and her thesis made all the more real by having sat in the Dáil beside him while Browne defended his position as his former allies tried to tear him apart, he went for a long walk, wrapped deep in his coat.

His feet led him to Philippe’s grave.

His laugh was hollow and hoarse with unshed tears.

“We’ve fucked it rightly.”

* * *

He was never a man given to strong language.

* * *

Noël’s smile was faint. “I think I’ll get used to the Opposition bench.”

(A man like him ought never be in the Opposition bench.)

* * *

If he had been paying attention to himself, he might have started to notice the signs. The poor sleep, the lack of appetite, his shirts fitting just a little looser than before. But there was the chaos of the resignation, and two papers to write, and the government fell over the price of milk and forced an election.

He and Sorelli went door to door all through the constituency, to get Noël elected again.

To say the people was on their side would be an understatement.

All of which is to say, he was not paying attention to himself. There was simply too much else to consider.

* * *

The tears in Sorelli’s eyes belied her hard façade, the night Noël was re-elected.

He squeezed her fingers tight, and her laugh was high and near-hysterical.

He was afraid to laugh himself in case he would never stop.

* * *

He turned his attention back to his work, and when he had to have two of his suits re-tailored to fit better, he put it down to having worked so hard.

* * *

One of the things he’s always been grateful for is owning his own house. True, during his years as an undergraduate he shared rooms on campus, but that was as much for the companionship as anything else. Being alone took a lot of getting used to, when he had stayed in dormitories all through his schooling. But on the day that he turned twenty-one and could rightfully inherit everything Philippe had left him, he came to own the house in Malahide. Such a simple thing, owning property, but never was he more keenly aware of the advantage of it, than in that year of 1951.

Upon his resignation, and the calling in of debts, Browne lost the house he had been leasing, forced to find somewhere else as soon as possible for the sake of his wife and two little girls.

Upon her denouncement in some quarters of the press and by the Catholic Church for having defended Browne’s scheme, including the gynecological elements of it, Sorelli lost the rooms she had been leasing since her return to Ireland nearly six years earlier.

What else could Raoul do, but take her in while she looked for somewhere else?

Most of her things she put into storage, as she had when she first went to England, but still the things she chose to keep almost filled up one of the guest rooms.

For all of the times he had been uncomfortable with the wealth of his grandfather that led him to buy such a big old house, being able to help her in her time of need was not one of those times.

* * *

He had almost gotten used to having other people around the house, when he was recovering from his surgery. He had gotten used to the echoes of voices, to laughter from the other room and the sounds of pottering around the kitchen, and when both Christine and Sorelli were gone again, the house felt empty, for a little while, until the quiet crept back into his bones.

Having Sorelli back filled a gap inside of him he had not known was there.

He would make it to the kitchen in the morning before her, and have tea made by the time she stumbled in, hair tousled and dressing gown wrapped tight around herself. And when she was busy learning her lines, he would retreat to his study, unless she needed someone to give her cues, or he needed to visit the university. She would proofread his papers for him, a fresh set of eyes, testing that it all made sense, and took it upon herself to be sure there would be always something for dinner, even when she was performing and didn’t have time to make anything herself. 

(He told her there was no need to go to such trouble, that there were any number of restaurants, but she was insistent.)

Evenings they would settle at the fire with a glass of wine and the newspaper, to read snippets of it to each other, and sometimes they would just sit, quietly, existing in the same space, easy to just to be together, soft jazz music turning slowly around them.

(Once or twice, he found her curled up on the sofa with Christine, both of them asleep, and instead of disturbing them he covered them with blankets, to keep them from getting cold.)

* * *

She bought him a gold watch when Christmas came, and he gave her pearls.

* * *

January 1952, three days after his birthday, and she suggested he should see a doctor.

He was still not sleeping well, often waking sweating though there were no nightmares. He often felt feverish during the day, lightheaded in a way that was not faintness so much as weakness, and he had had to get his clothes taken in again.

A persistent bout of influenza left him with a lingering cough.

She suggested a doctor, and added, with a faint smile that spoke of anxiety, “don’t want you getting pneumonia.” And then, “want to be sure you’re well before I go to England.”

She had been offered roles in two films, and would be leaving as soon as she had her affairs in order.

Surely he was only overworked, but to pacify her he went.

The doctor frowned to hear his symptoms, and suggested an x-ray of his chest.

He was no fool. And after his friendship with Browne, his heart dropped at the suggestion of a chest x-ray, but the doctor was noncommittal.

“Just want to be sure there’s no fluid.”

When Sorelli asked him what the doctor had said, he shrugged and told her that he had been advised to rest.

It was not quite a lie, but not the truth either.

For two more days he held off, and told himself the doctor was simply overreacting.

The thought of Sorelli finding out, that he had been advised an x-ray and not gone to have it—

He had given up smoking again, but he had one cigarette, and a finger of brandy to brace himself.

* * *

Tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis on both lungs.

* * *

His sisters died of it, it shortened his mother’s life, it probably helped to kill his father.

(It did kill Sorelli’s father, and her mother, and tried to destroy her bones.)

What would Philippe have said?

* * *

Tuberculosis.

* * *

He got outside into the chill air and vomited there on the side of the street.

* * *

Tuberculosis.

Consumption.

Captain of all those men of death.

* * *

He wandered the city in a daze, hardly daring to breathe.

* * *

He had only just turned twenty-nine.

* * *

Tuberculosis.

Surely there was some mistake? Surely the doctor read the x-ray wrong?

(Browne set up the screening program. Those doctors must have read hundreds of x-rays a day.)

* * *

He went home and went to bed in his clothes.

There would have to be his will put in order. Everything left to Sorelli, of course. No one else for it.

He was so tired, but how could he sleep? Knowing what was in his lungs. Knowing what wanted to steal his breath.

 _Couldn’t have either of you being alone_.

Sharing Philippe’s grave, when Philippe was the only one of them not to suffer with it.

_You could have died._

_could have died_

_could have died_

“A slight indisposition,” and a wan smile.

* * *

How long he lay there he could not say. Not sleeping, not thinking.

The bed creaked, Sorelli warm pressing herself to him, and he could not look her in the eye, her arm warm around his waist.

“What happened?” her voice soft in his ear.

“I—” A sigh.

“Tell me.” Her thumb brushing his neck.

“I have it.” Barely a breath.

She must have known, she must have suspected. No need to ask what “it” was. The sound of her swallowing. “You had an x-ray?”

A nod, impossible to manage words, and she drew a shaking breath, and her cheek warm pressed to her forehead.

“Well,” and her voice was hoarse. “Well.”

The tears welled burning in his eyes, and she drew him closer, and sighed.

* * *

(“We’ll get through this,” she whispered. “I promise.”)


	9. 9

His name was Jack, and he made it all bearable. 

More than bearable. 

He made what could have been hell into something beautiful.

* * *

But before that, there was the waiting. 

Three months of waiting, to get a bed in a sanatorium. 

And if it had not been for all that Noël had done as minister, it could have been so much longer.

* * *

If it were not for Sorelli, he might have gone quite mad. 

She took it upon herself to organize everything, to contact the people who needed to be contacted, and tell them that he was ill and could not possibly work for the foreseeable future. To keep him supplied with books, and music, and ensure he rested, and that those first consoling visits on the part of his colleagues and friends from the university would not be enough to wear him out. 

On the morning after he told her, as they still lay together on his bed, neither having slept at all, she kissed his forehead and whispered that she was cancelling the projects in England. 

“So help me,” she whispered, “but I’m going to be right here beside you until you’re well.” 

His throat was too tight with tears to speak, so he could only nod against her. 

She saw to it that all the necessary paperwork was attended to, that a solicitor came to see him so he could write up his will (though she insisted there was no need, insisted that he would recover), that his name was put down for a sanatorium bed. He didn’t care which one he went to. He would have gone to Merlin Park down in Galway if he had to, or crossed the border to one in the North, but it was Noël, after she told him, who insisted that it be Newcastle. 

“So I can keep an eye on you,” and his smile was faint. 

If Raoul were a different sort of man, he might have asked to jump the waiting list, might have insisted, based on their friendship, that he be given a bed straightaway. But he would never ask it. How could he? In all good conscience? What would give him the right to skip people waiting longer? What would give him the right to skip ahead of men with wives? With families? With so much more _need_ to live than him? 

He would never suggest it. 

He would rather die than suggest it. 

It was enough comfort to know that when he reached Newcastle, Noël would be his doctor.

* * *

It was one of the few times he almost asked Christine about the future. 

Surely she would know, if he lived or not.

* * *

She came to him a week after he heard the news. 

He was in bed, as Sorelli insisted he should be, where she could serve him meals and bring him books and ensure he did not exert his lungs. 

(He tried to persuade her that there was no need for it, but she gave him a look that might have been withering, if it were not edged with such concern.) 

Sometimes he found it difficult to gauge the age of these Christines, but this was a young one, from 2020, and that youth was clear in her eyes, just a little bloodshot. 

The first thing she did was hug him. 

The second was fix the pillows behind his back. 

“Sorelli told me,” she said, not meeting his gaze. 

If he were a superstitious man, he might have taken that as a sign. 

“I suspected as much,” and he tried to muster a smile for her, to pretend to be brave, to pretend as if he didn’t wonder, each night, if this disease would kill him. 

She nodded, and swallowed, and squeezed his hand. 

Her lips were soft, as she kissed his cheek.

* * *

Those three months were some of the longest of his life.

* * *

Sorelli moved the record player into his room, so he could at least have music, and where once they might have half-stumbled dancing clumsily with each other, now she crawled onto the bed beside him, and drew him close, and he tucked his head in under her chin. 

If there were ever tears, damp in his hair, neither of them mentioned them.

* * *

(“You’re the closest thing I’ve ever had to a brother.”)

* * *

(“Do you think she would have warned us, if she had known?” A swallow, flicker of an eyelid. “Impossible to know.”)

* * *

(“I could never ask for a better sister than you.”)

* * *

It never entered his head to go to England for treatment. 

He wouldn’t have stomached the boat journey anyway. 

And the thought of aeroplanes made him shiver.

* * *

22 April 1952. 

The day he arrived in Newcastle. 

(He had no idea, then, and it would be a great many years before he would, that forty years from that date Christine would be born.)

* * *

(He has often wondered, with age, and time, about the dates in his life, the dates in Christine’s, and in Sorelli’s, and what it is that links them all together.)

* * *

22 April 1952. 

The day he first met John Somers. 

John, who he was to share a room with, and the moment he shook his hand, those fingers calloused and light in his, John smiled, eyes shining and said, “call me Jack.”

* * *

An artist, and photographer, and poet. His hair was dark and thick and he combed it back roughly with his fingers, and his eyes were somewhere between green and blue, changing ever so slightly with the light. There were creases at the corners of his mouth from smiling, and lines edging his eyes from working too long in dark rooms, and he laughed to spite the tuberculosis eating his lungs, and that laugh seemed the bravest sound in the world. 

They say hindsight makes everything apparent. 

It is only with hindsight that he has realised he loved Jack from that very first moment.

* * *

But first there were x-rays, and Noël’s jaw set firm as he studied them, and then, with those long fingers, showed him the white spaces in his lungs that were the marks of the disease. 

He had never been a geographer, and anything he knew of medicine he knew from Noël and the old medical books in the library at home left by a granduncle who had been a doctor, but it was like looking at a map, as if these white spaces were the continents. 

(When he told Jack that, weeks later, after they had gotten to know each other, after they had redefined the nature of their association, Jack got that contemplative look, and wrote a poem about it, dedicated to RdC.) 

Noël met his gaze, and drummed his fingers on the desk, and said, “you have options.”

* * *

They decided on streptomycin, administered daily into his thigh. A high dose, for as long as it took, at least six weeks. And he tried not to think, maybe six months. That there would be ill effects, he was quite aware, and Noël’s lip twitched slightly knowingly as he added, “they’re not pleasant.” 

Collapse therapy, possibly, in time, if the streptomycin was not enough, of air injected into his chest to put pressure on the lung. Surgery the very last resort. 

“Surgery in such cases is the failure of modern medicine.”

* * *

“Welcome to the league of regular blood tests.” The first words Jack ever spoke to him, after his name, with that slightly wry smile. 

Jack, as it turned out, was forbidden streptomycin, because it played havoc with his weak kidneys, and he was not wrong about the blood tests. Raoul was to become quite inured to needles.

* * *

Jack was not a man who believed in waiting, certainly not in the circumstances they found themselves in. By that first night he had sketched Raoul twice, and had written a letter to his friend Harry requesting the next time he visit he bring a camera, and had mentioned several different chemicals and muttered to himself about platinum and collodion, and Raoul was just beginning to wonder if the man he was bound to share a room with for the foreseeable future was mad. 

(It was Sorelli, the next day, when she came to visit him, who took one look at Jack and declared him not mad, but of an _artistic temperament_.) 

(Jack, for his part, took one look at Sorelli, then shook her hand and declared it an honour to meet such an unequalled performer.) 

(If there was any way for him to endear himself to Raoul, it was to compliment Sorelli.)

* * *

The tinnitus was the first thing to arise, in his left ear, the day after his first dose of streptomycin. Browne, and it was taking some work to refer to him as Doctor Browne when he had been simply Noël for so long, assured him it was not unexpected, and warned him that temporary deafness may result, but that it would clear when he finished the course of treatment. 

After the first week, that low roar in his left ear had indeed given way to deafness, but at least the deafness did not disturb his sleep. 

Despite everyone’s best assurances, his heart thudded to think he may never get that hearing back. But if the streptomycin was to save his life, was to spare him from needing a surgery that would leave his chest deformed, that might itself kill him— 

The sacrifice of some of his hearing did not seem so terrible, by comparison. 

But Jack had a small radio, that one of his friends had brought him, and they put it on the locker between their beds, on Raoul’s right side, to be sure he could hear it. 

(If his heart gave an odd little skip, every time Jack smiled at him, every time the sunlight slanted across his face and made those eyes seem to glow, then he put that down to the streptomycin too.)

* * *

Sorelli came every day, with newspapers, and books, and she might not say very much at all, but just to have her there was enough, just to feel her hand rest gentle on top of his. 

Jack would get her telling stories of the theatre, and though Raoul had heard them all a hundred times already, to see the transformation that would come over her, to see the way Jack hung on her every word, made his heart thrill to hear them again. And when she fussed over him, he let her.

* * *

The first time Christine came, something flickered in her eyes to see Jack, and he put it down to circumstance, because of the way she smiled, then, and seemed relieved to find him in Newcastle at last.

* * *

He spent a great deal of time, kneading the stiffness of the injections from his thigh.

* * *

When Harry arrived with the camera, Jack took it with all the gentleness of if it were a child, and examined it and pronounced it perfect. 

Then he turned to Raoul and asked, “has anyone ever told you you have an extremely distinctive face?” 

That was how he found himself positioned by the window, with his head tilted to the side and a book in his lap, as Jack tried different positions and rearranged him and muttered to himself. Neither of them were supposed to be out of bed, but it hardly seemed to matter. 

He sent Harry off with an intricate list of instructions for developing the photos, and every one of them went over Raoul’s head, except for the muttered, “I wish there were a darkroom here.”

* * *

It was a full moon, the first night they kissed. 

A full moon, the light shining silver in through their window, and Jack had joined him in bed, because they were both supposed to be asleep, but neither of them were able to sleep, and with his newly damaged hearing, it made it easier to whisper of the world. 

They lay together, cheek to cheek, and Jack turned to him in the moonlight, and he was keenly aware, of the hand resting warm on his aching thigh. 

“You have very beautiful eyes.” 

The words were soft, barely whispered, and something caught in his throat, something like air, or like hope, something that was a sudden dawning, and he swallowed, and Jack blinked slowly, and leaned closer. 

Which of them closed the final distance, he would never know.

* * *

Tongue brushing his lower lip, breath hitching, hand slipping to rest on the curve of his hip, the warmth of another body pressed close, of Jack’s body, and his eyes slipped closed as his mouth opened, and he sighed, and swallowed, as that hand pressed him gently onto his back, and he tilted his head back, as those lips brushed his throat.

* * *

It was a little like dying. 

It was a little like finally breathing. 


	10. 10

Maybe it was that what they were doing was doubly illicit — their love for each other both illegal and out of place in a sanatorium. That it could only be the barest whispers in the darkness, and the softest muffled gasps. 

Two wrongs do not make a right. But being doubly wrong, in a matter such as that— 

How could what they were doing be wrong, when the very brush of Jack’s fingertips against his skin made him feel more real than he ever had?

* * *

Sorelli realised it, the change that had come about between them, on the very next day, her first visit since they had lain in each other’s arms, and they had hardly dared to speak, hardly dared to breathe too loud lest a nurse would decide to check. 

(Jack had only retreated to his own bed, when it was coming near time for the night rounds.) 

But the next day, Sorelli had only been there a handful of minutes, only long enough to say hello and kiss his cheek, when they brought Jack for fresh x-rays, and as the door closed behind him, she quirked her brow at Raoul. 

“Tell me what happened between you,” and a slight smile about her lips. 

“What makes you think anything happened?” he knew it was pointless to pretend with her, but still he felt compelled to at least try. 

“You forget all the homosexuals in the theatre.” 

The first time he heard the word, in this new light. Not only applied to someone else, but also, implicitly, to him. 

A homosexual. 

_That_ was why he had never enjoyed his encounters with women. 

A homosexual. 

A cold creeping anxiety in his stomach, to think of people finding out, and he could not say what crossed his face, only that Sorelli frowned, and squeezed his fingers, and whispered, “no one need ever know outside this room.” The frown softened into a smile, and she kissed his forehead. “As long as he makes you happy.”

* * *

(When Jack returned, she shook his hand, but Raoul did not hear what was said because it was his turn to be x-rayed, and though there was no change in his chest, no improvement or disimprovement, it hardly seemed to matter, because when he was back in his room, Jack’s laugh, beautiful and loud, was all he could hear.) 

(The smile that Sorelli gave him was one of approval.)

* * *

Every moment he was not kissing Jack felt like a waste. 

He had never known kisses could be that way.

* * *

The tingling in his fingertips was the streptomycin. Not so bad of a side effect, as side effects go, and promised, by Browne, to be just as temporary as the slight deafness. 

Raoul hated it for diminishing the smooth softness of Jack’s skin beneath his hand.

* * *

The first time Christine met Jack, what must have been the first time for her because an older her had met him already, something odd crossed her face, and his heart caught, before she smiled, and there was something just a little damp about her eyes. 

He decided it best not to ask.

* * *

The watery early morning sunlight of May stirred him awake, and with eyes half-open he could see Jack, sitting up in the other bed, sketchbook in his lap and pencil in hand. His hands were so slim, slender and pale, delicate wrists, fingers elegant as they moved, a look of such concentration on his face Raoul decided it best to pretend to be still asleep, and not disturb him. 

Still he watched him through the web of his lashes, as he canted his head, and when he glanced over at Raoul it was still with that focus in his eyes, and Raoul knew that it was not that Jack had realised he was awake, but that Jack was sketching _him_. 

No one had ever sketched him before. 

Tears prickled the backs of his eyes, and he swallowed hard against the sudden tightness in his throat, and did his best to keep lying still.

* * *

The watering of his eyes, another side effect, promised to last only a few days, made it difficult to read, so Sorelli read pieces from the newspaper to him when she came, and he lay there with his eyes closed, half-dozing, snorting at the way she dramatized the social and personal ads. (“I imagine the Jolleys are quite jolly with their new daughter.” “Do you even know them?” “Never met them in my life.”) 

In her absence, Jack read to him. Not the papers, but poetry. Yeats, and Pearse, Keats, Shelley, and the entirety of _Adonais_ recited into his neck in the still of night, the warmth of Jack pressed close and his hand resting light just beneath the waistband of his pajamas, so that his hairs prickled and his breaths stuttered, and it was all he could do not to interrupt him, not to kiss him and press him onto his back and swallow every word. 

(After, when Jack’s hand slipped lower, cupped him gently and those breathed words turned to kisses, he bit his lip to keep himself from crying out, and the blood was iron and warm on his tongue.)

* * *

The vertigo started with a headache that lasted two days, pounding behind his eyes, and then when he opened his eyes the world tilted around him even as he lay still. Sitting up made the room spin, and the very thought of standing made bile rise in his throat. 

Sorelli brought him a scarf, to cover his eyes, and it eased some of that sensation of falling. 

Browne checked his ears, and his eyes, and listened to his chest, and pronounced that the worst of it would be short-lived and added, “it isn’t so severe as the Sanocrysin.” 

Raoul had heard all about the Sanocrysin and it’s terrible effects, and swallowed down the retort that he would prefer not to deal with it at all. 

(Though something about the thought of Sanocrysin, and having gold injected into his veins, struck him as something Jack might write of.)

* * *

That he could not shave with the weakness was an indignity, and one that Sorelli remedied with her steady hands. The scrape of the blade on his skin, and her voice in his ear reminding him that he would be well again in time, made him feel a little more normal.

* * *

It lasted a week, at its worst. A week in which he could barely eat, a week in which sleep felt like he was on a boat and he had visions of rocking stars and mast and sails and every one of them ended in blood in water, and trying to pull Philippe back. 

When he woke gasping, Jack came into his bed and pulled him close, and carded his fingers through his hair until he could breathe easy again.

* * *

After that first week, he found himself able to sit, and to stand, and for everything to remain steady so long as he was careful not to move too fast. 

Jack’s friend Harry came again, with the camera, again, and with what Jack informed him was a platinotype, a photo taken at Harry’s last visit. 

Raoul got a jolt to see himself, to see himself not quite how he knows himself to be. A little more handsome, a little more refined, a little paler, his eyes light. In the photo he is sitting by the window, with a blanket around his shoulders, and a book on his lap, and he seems to be looking at something just past the camera, eyes not making contact with it, a mildly contemplative look on his face, his loose pyjama shirt slightly open at the neck, collarbone just visible. His hair is a little tousled, because Jack insisted he not smooth it before the photograph, and he looks a little like a poet, or slightly fae, or like what he is, an itinerant academic, framed by the window and the pine trees outside. 

Him, but not him as he had ever seen before. 

(He still has the print, framed and sitting in his study, and when Christine, this young Christine who has been the highlight of the last years of his life, when she asked him, once, when it was taken, he gave her a noncommittal answer.) 

Jack insisted he properly dress, insisted he wear a scarf and fussed over him sitting in a chair until Raoul felt the beginnings of exasperation at him, then framed him again at the window, his head tilted and face expressionless, with a newspaper beneath his hand, and the light, this time, just a little darker. 

Raoul’s heart fluttered to think how he might look in this photo. 

(He still has that one, too, safe beside the first, and while he thought at the time he was wearing the same inscrutable expression as in the first, there is just the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth.) 

(“You look ready to commit an act of mischief,” Sorelli smiled the first time she saw it, and his cheeks flushed.)

* * *

Jack’s fingers light tracing his thigh, skimming the bruising of the injections, the thrill of that touch running through him. 

Jack’s lips following his fingers, gentle, careful, brushing each blemish, each tender ache, and at his gasp from the frisson of stinging pain, that kiss became a nuzzle, fingers twining with his, squeezing gently. 

Across all the years, he still remembers the press of Jack’s lips, and the soft caress of his touch, the weight of his head, resting upon his hip.

* * *

In the outside world, they might never have met. 

In the outside world, if they had met, they might never have become lovers. 

In the outside world, there might never have been a night of them holding each other, pressing carefully together not to jar aching limbs and tender chests and not to fall off beds designed to only hold one person, hands cupping the backs of heads, and whispers, so low it was like breathing, that they love each other. 

Their lips met, and he closed his eyes.

* * *

(It is not that he was happy to have tuberculosis, happy to be suffering so with the effects of the streptomycin, it is more that if he had _not_ had tuberculosis, if he had not met Jack—)

* * *

They were always careful to be quiet, always careful not to over exert each other, always careful that they would not cough. 

At least, not any more than normal.

* * *

He wondered, often, if the streptomycin was working. At each test the tuberculosis was still in his system. With each x-ray it was still in his lungs and Browne’s face was contemplative each time he studied the images. If he spoke too loud or laughed too hard or if his heart pounded too strong it would put him coughing again and he coughed his way into every morning, as did Jack. A fine pair they made, the two of them in neighboring beds, coughing themselves awake and if they caught each other’s gaze they would start to laugh, to remember their touches of the night, and make the coughing worse. 

He wondered often, but at the weekly weigh-in, his weight held close to steady. 

(Jack was always down a few pounds.)

* * *

In July it was decided that Jack needed more air put into his chest to keep pressure on his left lung. What had been an irritation became uncomfortable if he lay too long on his left side. He often had to lean just a little sideways, but it didn’t stop him from being hunched over writing, or sketching, and it didn’t stop him from coming into Raoul’s bed each night. 

“Improvement takes time,” he said, and smiled.

* * *

In July, too, the newest x-rays showed an improvement in Raoul’s right lung, smaller lesions of white, and the relief left him weak to see it. 

Browne smiled, and leaned back in his chair, and the satisfaction was plain to see. 

“A long way to go,” he said, in his understated way, and Raoul almost laughed. 

Sorelli kissed him, and grinned when she heard the news, and Christine, who had come with her, hugged him. 

That night, as Jack’s hand slipped to caress him, he rolled him over, and kissed him, and slipped his own hand between Jack’s legs. 

Jack’s skin was warmer, and softer, than he had ever felt it before. 


	11. 11

A grandfather down in Clare, all the family Jack had left in the world, a man too frail to travel to see him. 

And that was part of what bound them too. Their being the last of their blood, come to this, unlikely to pass on their family names. 

Did such a thing matter to Philippe? Would it have mattered to him, had he known he would die? Had he known it would fall to Raoul, the weight of family history? 

He cannot see that it would have mattered to him. If it had mattered to him, he would married someone other than Sorelli, married someone of their standing in the world. He would never have put such a burden on Raoul, to be the respectable one. 

Though there is so little, really, that he knows of his brother as a man, as someone other than his brother, as the one who should have been a Duke if it had not been for their grandfather’s decision to give up the title. So little he knows of how other people saw him, and how he saw them, and Raoul knows that much, and has always known it. 

Philippe would never force something on him, if he would not do it himself. 

That knowledge, that whether or not Philippe would have been upset at his being a homosexual, at his loving Jack, that he would never have forced him to marry and pass on the family name, made lying in Jack’s arms the most comfortable place in the world.

* * *

(He mentioned it to Sorelli, in a quiet way, one day when Jack was off having more air put into the space in his chest, and she squeezed his fingers and smiled at him and said, “I don’t think he would have been upset at all.”)

* * *

(“Christine told me he knew about our feelings for each other, and gave us his blessing, if something should happen.”)

* * *

(“He only ever wanted you to be happy.”)

* * *

A small cottage in Connemara. 

It was a notion, an idea that felt intangible with where they were, but like it could be a possibility, someday, after they were well again. 

A small cottage in Connemara, where Jack could write, and sketch, and look at the sea, and take photographs of tiny wildflowers growing up between the stones. A small cottage in Connemara, with his books, and his record player, that he could retreat to when the world of academia got tiring. 

And sometimes they whispered of it in the darkness, after kisses, as they held each other beneath the sheets before Jack retreated back to his own bed. The life they would have back in the outside world, together. Jack come to live with him, and one of the guest rooms would become his studio, and they would have Connemara for when pretending got too tiring, when they just wanted to hide on the world, and only Sorelli would be allowed to visit, and Harry. And Christine. 

He would have to tell Jack about Christine, but he decided to leave that for her to do, in her own way. 

It would be too unbelievable otherwise.

* * *

The condition of his right lung improved all through July. His left lung was more stubborn, the lesions on the x-ray slow to change, but by the end of the month Browne told him that there was, perhaps, a slight clearance. 

“We can try the collapse therapy, if you want.” 

The collapse therapy, like Jack, the air injected into his chest. But the collapse therapy was not working for Jack. His x-rays never showed any improvement, and though he remained optimistic, Raoul wondered how much of it was to keep him from worrying. 

(No. He did not want the collapse therapy. Not unless he had no choice.) 

He did his best not to think of it, and held him a little closer in their secret hours at night.

* * *

Lying very still, so Jack could precisely sketch the angles of his face, was a trial when what he wanted to do was take his hand and kiss his fingers.

* * *

Jack’s fingers were always gentle, tracing his appendectomy scar, as if it might be capable of feeling pain, of remembering the scalpel that cut it there. 

The skin around it has always been a little more tender, and the brush of lips against it made him shiver.

* * *

That Jack was still losing weight, that his cough every morning seemed worse, that his sheets were often drenched with sweat though he spent part of the night in Raoul’s bed, that his eyes were fever bright in the moonlight, were all things that Raoul tried not to think about.

* * *

It was August when Raoul was deemed well enough for short walks around the grounds. August, still too warm for any chill though he was bundled up well in layers of clothes, and it was often nurses that went with him, but sometimes it was Sorelli, and it was wonderful to be out again, wonderful to feel the sun on his face. 

The windows in their room were permanently open, to let the fresh air in, even when there was rain, but feeling the air against his skin while outside was the oddest sort of relief. 

Sorelli would link her arm with his, and squeeze his fingers tight, and he wondered, often, why it was that he was getting better, however slowly, while Jack was not improving at all. 

If his kidneys had not been weak, if he had been able to have the streptomycin, would he have been out there too?

* * *

Jack was not a man with scars, but he had the fairest hairs trailing beneath his navel, never mind his hair was black, and Raoul traced them, and kissed them, and his heart skipped with every whimper Jack made, caused by his touch. 

If he had been an artist, he would have sketched him, too. As it was he committed him to memory, carefully, slowly, night after night, with kisses and his half-numb fingertips. How the skin at the inside crease of his hip was velvet soft and warm, and the dips between his ribs, the hard ridge of his collarbone. How kissing his inner thigh left him breathless, and how, when he held him close, head balanced on his shoulder, forehead against his neck, how he gasped when Raoul stroked him, and caressed him, and brought him to release. 

The weight of him, as he sank back boneless into Raoul’s arms. 

(How they hated, when he had to return to his own bed, so Raoul started coming into his instead, when all he wanted was to learn and hold him and give him something that would make him feel good, make him feel well, if only for a little while. And he would carefully clean him up, and tuck the sheets around him, and kiss his forehead as he dozed, and hold him, just a little longer, maybe, than was wise, before slipping back into his own bed.) 

(Jack’s sleeping face, silver under the moonlight that came through their window, was the most beautiful in the world.)

* * *

In September, Doctor Cullen, the Resident Medical Superintendent, head of the medical staff, pronounced Jack’s only hope was surgery. 

Surgery. 

Either remove the ribs to permanently collapse the left lung, or remove the lung. And Jack’s right lung was perfectly well. 

It was as if all the air had gone out of the room, when Jack told him, with a face like a mask, the most expressionless Raoul had ever seen him. 

Surgery. 

It was a good thing, surely, that they thought him well enough to have surgery, well enough to withstand it. 

Surgery, the very last resort. 

The echo of Browne’s voice in his head, _the failure of_ _modern_ _medicine._

Browne himself (Noël, _Noël_ ) had almost died when he had surgery for his TB. 

What if that were to happen to Jack? What if it went badly and it took him months and months to recover, to even begin to recover, and Raoul had long-since left Newcastle? To not be able see him every day, to not be able to kiss him and hold him because there would be other people? 

But if Jack lived— 

But what if the surgery didn’t work? What if the disease attacked his good lung, then? 

His heart was pounding so fast he could hardly breathe. It was all he could do to pull Jack close, and when he felt tears against his neck, he held him tighter, and closed his eyes against the ones ready to trickle down his own cheeks.

* * *

How could his own returning health, how could the clearance of the disease in his own lungs, be any comfort? How could anything feel better, knowing surgery was Jack’s only hope? 

What made him special, that his kidneys were strong, and the streptomycin could work?

* * *

Each night, he crawled into Jack’s bed, and held him, and neither of them said very much at all.

* * *

Sorelli hugged Jack when she heard the news. 

Christine was there, too, that day. And he wanted her to tell him, wanted her to promise him, that Jack would be alright, that the surgery would work and nothing could go wrong and he’d be out in a couple of months and move in with him in Malahide and they’d lie together by the fire and listen to the record player and none of this would matter, none of it, it would only matter that they were both well and they had each other, and they would get that little cottage in Connemara where they could hide from the world. 

He wanted her to tell him, wanted to squeeze her hands and look her dead in the eye so she could not lie, and tell him. But he swallowed down the urge, swallowed it down deep inside and mustered a smile for her, and she squeezed his trembling hands, and kissed his cheek, and he didn’t ask her a thing at all.

* * *

“You can have my sketchbook.” Jack’s voice matter-of-fact, as steady as if he were talking about the weather. “And the photographs. And my poetry. Harry will know what to give you. I don’t want it going to my grandfather.” 

“You’re going to be alright.” And he ached to believe it, ached to make Jack himself believe it, that there was no need to think these things, no need to tell him these things. 

“I know.” He said it as if what Raoul had said was the most obvious thing in the world. “I know. But I don’t want the old man to get a heart attack if he found any of these things.” And a slight smile, that told Raoul there was no use in arguing with him, no use in trying to persuade him that he did not need to divide out his things. 

“So, the sketchbooks…”

* * *

That night, the last night, they lay pressed together on Jack’s narrow bed, watching the stars through the branches of the trees outside. Neither of them speaking, because to speak felt as if it would crack something, felt as if the world was fragile and their very words were fragile, and Jack lay his head against his shoulder, and Raoul pressed his cheek to his forehead, and for a long time they just breathed, quietly, together. 

The last night, but there would have to be nights after. There would have to be. 

“Touch me,” and Jack’s voice was faint. “I want to feel something nice.” 

Something nice, something gentle and careful, and when Raoul nodded, and kissed his forehead, Jack huffed a slight laugh. 

“Who knows when I’ll be well enough for you to touch me again?”

* * *

(Their touches, that night, were the most careful, the most delicate. And they hardly spoke at all, just kissed, and touched, and held each other, and Jack traced his scars, traced the bruising of his thigh, and Raoul carded his fingers through his hair, and in the soft light from the night sky through their window, he committed his eyes to memory, that shifting blue and green.)

* * *

(After sixty-five years, it’s still Jack’s eyes that he remembers best.)

* * *

“You’ll come see me afterwards?” 

“Just as soon as I’m allowed.” 

A smile. “Good.” 

If his lips lingered a little longer on Jack’s, then neither of them spoke of it. 


	12. 12

He remembers everything about the day Jack died.

* * *

He remembers not having slept very much the night before, for being with him. And for the anxiety, afterwards, that coiled in his stomach.

He remembers lying awake a long time, in his own bed, and watching him sleep, watching the slight stirrings of his face, watching the way the first rays of sunlight cast his skin a faint gold.

He dozed, for a little while, sometime after that.

He remembers not being able to eat, when the nurse brought around breakfast, and he remembers Jack’s not being allowed to eat.

He remembers them offering him something for nausea, and his refusal to take it, saying that he was tired, and Noël coming in on his morning rounds, like every morning, but this time with the edge of something unnameable in his eyes. And the slightly probing way he asked, if everything was alright.

He remembers the quiet interlude, before Jack had to go, and the way he kissed him, softly, on the cheek.

He remembers that last hug, and the way he pulled him just a little tighter.

(He was always taller than Jack. It made hugging him all the more lovely.)

And he remembers lying back down on his bed, when Jack had gone to meet with the surgeon, and breathing, slowly, through his nose, trying to ease the aching in his heart.

Those were the first tears he had allowed himself to shed.

* * *

Sorelli came to see him, early in the day, and neither of them spoke, but she lay down on the bed beside him, and he tucked himself small against her, and for a long time they stayed like that, breathing slowly together, all of the words they could give voice to hollow when there was nothing for him but waiting.

She insisted he take his daily walk as normal, and there was no point in trying to argue with her.

* * *

It was a fine day. He has always remembered that. A fine day, with just the slightest chill.

* * *

He couldn’t read. His brain wouldn’t focus on the words. He couldn’t sit, couldn’t lie still. And he was tired, but he was past being able to feel tired. Even Jack’s little radio was more than he could stand. So he paced. Circled the room and learned every step of it and traced the slightest cracks in the wall, as if they had been put there for a reason, as if they had a meaning other than the aging of the plaster.

* * *

Surely it should not take so many hours?

* * *

He knew, from one look at Noël’s face.

* * *

It was late in the afternoon, when Noël came to see him. And though his face was carefully blank, it was that very blankness that told him.

His heart lurched, and black spots danced at the edges of his vision, as Noël put a steadying hand on his arm.

“What happened?” he whispered.

* * *

A haemorrhage.

A haemorrhage.

* * *

He had survived the surgery, and it had gone well. And afterwards, as he recovered from the anaesthetic, he whispered that he didn’t feel very well, and blood started leaking through his bandages, more blood than there should have been. So they took him back to surgery, to try to stop the bleeding, and he stopped breathing, there, beneath their hands, and his heart faltered and failed, and they tried everything, every drug and technique they had, and none of it was enough.

(Noël had not wanted to tell him so many details, but he pressed him, because he had to know.)

(Noël had not been there, had been looking after the patients that needed the air topped up in their chests, but they told him all about it.)

The silence was more than he could stand.

His voice was hardly a croak.

“Can I see him?”

* * *

It wasn’t right, seeing Jack’s face so pale and still.

Those eyes closed, lids cold and soft beneath his fingers.

His lips were slightly blue.

He wasn’t sure what made him do it. He’s not sure, even now, why he did it. But something compelled him to, some part of him that had to see, had to know, and maybe it was because he always wondered what it would have been like, if he had done it with Philippe. If it would have made it easier to bear.

He took a deep breath to steady himself, and drew the sheet down past Jack’s shoulders.

His first thought was relief that they had stitched him back together. How much worse would it have been, if they had not?

Most of the scarring, he knew, would have been on his back, but he traced the part of it that looped around his side onto his chest, and there was just the slightest smear of blood on his fingers after.

(He can still feel the ridges of the stitches beneath his fingertips.)

(If it had not been for that slight numbness, how much keener would he have felt them?)

That this was it. This was how they had removed his lung. This was how they went back into his chest to stop the bleeding.

That this was what had killed him.

The image of it swam before him through the tears that burned his eyes.

If Noël had not been there, he would have kissed him.

* * *

Sorelli came that evening, though it was after visiting hours, and he knew Noël had called her. That he must have, because otherwise how could she have known?

She hugged him, and kissed away the tears that welled in his eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

* * *

That she had cancelled the rehearsal of the play she was directing, because Jack died and he needed her, she didn’t tell him for years.

At the time, he never even thought of it.

* * *

She could not stay the night, and the loneliness, when she left, crushed the air from his lungs.

That last night Jack was here— Last night they spoke to each other and held each other and promised they would have all the time in the world—

He lay on his left side, facing away from the empty bed, and still sleep refused to come.

The pain, gnawing in his side, was more real than Jack being gone.

* * *

It was near morning, when Christine came to him.

She stole through the door dressed as a nurse as the first dim light lit the room, and he saw for the first time the creases of her face, the lines edging the corners of her eyes though he knew, in a way that had become instinctive, that this Christine was no older than him.

(She was so often close to his own age that it was unusual for her not to be.)

Her eyes seemed like those of another world, as they met his, and in that moment a great many things, that had been somewhere lost in the back of his head for weeks, and months (and years), seemed to coalesce into form.

Christine, come to see him, as if by some form of magic.

He swallowed, and shifted in the bed, and raised himself up to sit, even though it made the pain deep in chest prickle worse.

So help him, but he would meet her properly, and not like the wreck that he felt.

She settled on the edge of the bed, and for the first time that he could remember, she didn’t reach for his hand.

Something seemed different about her, but it was impossible for him to name it.

He curled his fingers tight to keep himself from reaching for her. And his voice, when he spoke, was hoarse.

“You knew, didn’t you?”

Her eyes flickered, just slightly, as she nodded.

He swallowed hard against the pain that kicked in his chest. _She knew. She knew_.

Of course she knew.

“How?”

Surely there were a multitude of ways she might have found out, ways unfamiliar to him from her own time, but it seemed so important, for once, to know, so important to ask about these things.

Her voice was low, and her eyes never wavered from his. “You told me.”

He told her.

Something almost like relief swept through him, and it prickled hard behind his eyes. He told her. Some older, future version of him, that she has met through time. Some version of him that never forgot Jack, never forgot this.

(How could he ever forget Jack?)

“And you didn’t tell me?” Didn’t tell him, just like she never told him anything of the future, nothing only the vaguest most ill-defined scraps.

Why should she have told him this when she never told him anything else before?

Her next words cut him to the core.

“It couldn’t have saved him if I had.”

* * *

(“I wanted to protect you from having to know.”)

* * *

(“You knew about Philippe, too, didn’t you? And you never told Sorelli?” The slightest shake of her head, tears prickling in her eyes. “And that was why you didn’t see each other for so long.”)

* * *

(None of them were questions, really.)

* * *

He could have told her to go away. Could have told her to leave him be, that he didn’t want to see her, didn’t want to see anyone. But the thought of being alone in the room, as the light made the shadows deepen, was too much for words. And when he reached for her hand, she squeezed his fingers, and that was when the tears came.

She drew him into her arms, and he let her.

(When he could cry no more, when he could barely keep his head up for the tiredness, she lay him down, and lay behind him, and with her fingers twined between his he dozed, for a little while. When he woke, to full light, and the sounds of the wards coming to life, she was gone.)

* * *

Harry came to see him that day, and Sorelli, who had returned, slipped out of the room, to give them space.

“I’m taking him to his grandfather,” his voice was low, his eyes still bloodshot with tears, and Raoul was past being able to speak. He could only nod, and Harry squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry.” The words were so faint Raoul could barely hear them, and then he was gone, and Sorelli was back, taking him in her arms, and he leaned into her, and sighed.

* * *

Sorelli told him, the next day, that Harry had brought all the things Jack had specified to Malahide.

Raoul traced his fingers lightly over the sketchbook still in the room, and couldn’t bring himself to open it.

* * *

Five months. Was that really all they had had?

* * *

Noël tried to persuade him to take a sedative, to help him sleep, reminding him that he still needed rest, but he refused to take it, refused to take anything that might dull the hollowness, that might dull his ability to remember Jack.

He considered telling Noël about the persistent pain still in his left side, but couldn’t sum up the energy to find the words.

Besides, he would be having x-rays again in two days. Time enough for him to find out then, if there was anything to find.

(The thought of trying to fight the disease any longer seemed almost too much.)

* * *

(Two days, as it happened, was too long to wait.)

* * *

He was at the window, contemplating the pine trees, and wondering how long it would be before someone came to fill Jack’s bed. Surely there would be someone on the waiting list, in a dire state ready to fill it. How could he ever face seeing someone else in that bed? Seeing a different face, hearing a different voice? Someone who might have visitors, more visitors than just Sorelli, who would disturb his peace, disturb his grief, and he would have to pretend to be alright, pretend that nothing had happened.

Pretend as if he had never loved the man who had been in that bed.

(Who had died and made space for this other new man.)

And he was thinking, that Jack would love to photograph the trees like this, with the sunlight falling through the needles, and that Jack would want him to look through the sketchbook. Would want him to treasure it and keep it always. And thinking that maybe he was ready to look in it now, ready that he might be able to breathe through the pain when he opened it, when he became conscious of the ache. That niggling pain in his side, and he gasped as it sharpened, and gripped the windowsill to steady himself so he wouldn’t fall. It lanced again and then, relief, and he had just thought that maybe it was gone, maybe there would be no need to tell Noël about it at all, when he felt the cough coming.

He took a deep breath to try to ward it off, and tasted the rise of iron in his throat. Iron?

He coughed, and gagged, and gasped, and the blood was bright red on his hand.

And the pain tore through him as he gasped for breath, and choked on a fresh rush of blood.


	13. 13

Mostly, it was a haze.

A haze of pain, a haze of voices and hands, a haze of trying to breathe when every breath was fighting a rush of blood coming up against it.

He has a distinct impression of having spent a long time in a chair, of a basin in his lap and the redness of it, this pool of red, pink froth floating on the top. The chill of his skin, and he was cold but he could feel the sweat on his forehead, couldn’t keep himself from shivering, his hands trembling.

Fingers, tapping the back of his neck, drawing his focus back to Noël’s voice soft in his ear. “Slow breaths…best not try to speak.”

All he could taste was iron and salt.

* * *

(He has few clear memories of those hours after the haemorrhage. There are impressions of impressions and pieces of moments and odd unconnected thoughts and words spoken close to him. Mostly he remembers the heaviness of himself, and the cold of his chest, and how gentle the fingers were, on his face, and in his hair, and twined between his own.)

* * *

The pricks of needles sharp in his arm. A soft murmur, “constrict the vessels…help it clot.” He remembers the stinging of it, how cold it felt beneath his skin, as keenly as if it were only a few minutes ago, and not a lifetime in the past.

* * *

There were x-rays, at some point. X-rays to show the extent of damage in his left lung, when he had stopped coughing. Not an aneurysm, but a cavitation, the disease impinging on a blood vessel, a section in his lung hollowed out.

Noël’s mouth, creased grave.

* * *

“…no sign of it sooner…”

And he couldn’t mention the pain that had lingered because he was under orders not to speak lest he tear something.

* * *

The stethoscope cold pressed to his back, to his chest. A soft murmur, indistinct, fingers pressed into his wrist. “A little fast…”

* * *

“…prefer to avoid surgery if I can…”

* * *

Too tired to keep his eyes open, to lift his head.

The sensation of being lowered, and blankets.

“Sssshhh. Just rest. I’ll be right here.”

* * *

Pillows and softness and the odd sensation of floating through air, the pain in his chest dulled. Feeling just a little sideways, his right side higher than his left.

Fingers, curled between his, delicate and slim.

“I’m here,” a whisper that could be Sorelli. “I’m here.”

* * *

A good long time, just stillness and quiet.

Somewhere, the brush of fingertips against his cheek. And an echo, like Jack’s laugh.

Such a lovely laugh.

How the lancing sunlight danced along his skin.

_“As songs go I prefer ‘Stardust’ instead.”_

_“Please. Nothing compares to ‘You Go to My Head.’”_

_“We could always dance to compare them.”_

_“Would it be frowned upon if we were found?”_

_“I’d say it was in the name of scientific investigation.”_

_“If it was in the name of science…”_

* * *

“…too much for him to have to go through…”

* * *

_“It would be lovely to forget the world exists.” Jack’s voice soft in his ear, hand gentle resting on his belly. “To have that cottage in Connemara, and not care about anything happening anywhere else. Just us, and the sea, and the birds…the quiet of it…” A sigh, the brush of fingers over his hair. “We could spend all the time we want, just like this…”_

_The birds out over the water, the little flowers and the sun, striking gold off the rocks around, and them, lying still in the grass, just the two of them, safe and secret, always…_

* * *

A cheek pressed against his, thumb rubbing circles into the back of his hand, and soft breaths that seemed so free. The dampness of tears pressed to his skin.

An ache in his left arm, and he tried to move it to ease it, but a hand wrapped around his wrist to keep him still, and he was too tired to fight it.

“Easy, Raoul, easy.”

Soft press of fingers into his wrist, into his throat.

And cold, his chest so cold. Where were the blankets that he was not warm?

* * *

_“Had we but world enough and time, this coyness lady were no crime…” and a kiss to the corner of his mouth, pressed gentle and soft._

* * *

Pain tearing through his chest. Retching and gagging and iron rising hot on his tongue as he gasped against it. A hand rolling him onto his side, rubbing his back.

“Easy, Raoul, easy…best to get it all out...”

* * *

_A blue eye blooming green in the middle and the creases of a grin._

* * *

An explosion on the water and blood, so much blood.

How could a body contain all that blood?

* * *

A hand resting beside his own, pale and fine. He could see it dimly. A hand like Philippe’s, and he was ill once as a boy, and Philippe stayed with him all night and did that mean Philippe had come to see him? Had come to stay with him?

A hand and with his flickering glance he saw the black of the sleeve at the wrist, so delicate, and his eyes were too heavy to follow the trail of that arm up and see Philippe’s face, but it was enough to know he was there, enough that he had come, after so long.

His fingers twitched and brushed those fingers, too weak to grasp that hand, a soft shushing from somewhere above him, and tears prickled his eyes, but why were there tears? Philippe had come to see him.

The fingers curled around his own, and squeezed them.

* * *

“…any change?”

“…off duty…”

“…pressure still weak…”

“…not to…expect me home…”

* * *

That he was not alone, he could always feel, and everything was quiet. Quiet and gentle as silk.

* * *

Jack would kiss him and he would be better. Jack would be worrying and fussing over him. Jack was probably sketching him, and the lines of his face heavy on the pillow.

He remembers thinking it, and thinking that if Jack created something beautiful from it then maybe it would not be so bad after all.

* * *

Noël’s face pale through the net of his lashes.

Sorelli’s voice soft in his ear.

Philippe’s hand, curled around his own.

( _They must be letting Jack rest_.)

* * *

“ _…The grave’s a fine and private place/But none, I think, do there embrace…”_

_Soft breath upon his skin, murmured words and kisses and a sigh into the darkness._

* * *

(“Nothing more to do for now, except wait.”)


	14. 14

Noël’s face, grey in the soft light of pre-dawn. 

He came to consciousness almost suddenly, a slow surfacing as if from beneath the stillest of seas, the water breaking over his head as his eyes snapped open. He gasped involuntarily, and groaned when that jarred something deep inside him. The softest shushing sound, and a finger pressed to his lips. 

He swallowed hard, the iron taste of blood foul on his tongue, and rolled his head, and that was when he saw Noël. 

Noël’s finger, pressed to his lips, that gentle order not to speak. 

“You had a haemorrhage,” his words low and soft. “We managed to collapse the lung and stop the bleeding, but if it starts again it will need surgery. You’ve had two transfusions, and morphine for the pain. Best to lie still and not try to speak.” 

His head was too fuzzy to piece the words together. A haemorrhage. A haemorrhage meant bleeding, bleeding in his lung. That was what he could taste. Blood, old blood. 

If there had been bleeding, why was he lying at an angle? Something under his right shoulder, keeping it up, and he shifted against it, trying to get more comfortable, but Noël’s hand pressed his shoulder gently to be still. 

“Need to keep your right side higher than your left,” and the faint crease of what might have been a smile. “Keep any blood from flowing into your right lung.” 

It seemed like that was important, somehow, but why he could not grasp. 

His eyes flickered closed again, too heavy to keep open, and he felt Noël’s fingers pressing into his wrist. 

Something prickled at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t think what. Something, something about someone. Jack? Where was Jack? _He must be…must be worrying._

His eyes flickered back open, and he rolled his head to the right, against the pillows keeping him propped, but instead of seeing Jack, smiling sleepily at him from the other bed, all he saw were curtains, shielding the bed from view. 

And Sorelli. 

Sorelli, asleep, her head on the pillow beside his, and when his fingers twitched, too heavy to lift to brush the hair from her face, he felt her hand, warm and soft, lying on top of his. 

Sorelli. 

Tears prickled his eyes, but he could not say why. 

Noël’s voice, even softer than before. “She came as soon as she heard.” And he murmured something else, indistinct through the haze in Raoul’s ears, dim when all Raoul could feel was her hand, and he carefully turned his hand over, to feel her palm against his. 

Sorelli. 

Of course she came. Of course. 

And yet the tears prickled his eyes, tears of no reason, and blurred his vision so that he closed his eyes rather than not be able to see, and distantly he felt the blankets being tucked around him, felt a hand brush his forehead. 

God, but he was so tired. 

The dabbing of a cloth against his cheeks, drying the tears, and a soft, whispered, “I suggest you follow her lead.”

* * *

“…you were the most important person to him in the world. I always knew it and I was never jealous. How could I be?” 

Dimly he saw her wipe the tears from her eyes, but he was too tired to let her know he was awake. Maybe she wanted him to hear, wanted him to know these things. And as she faded from view he felt a hand rest light in his hair. 

“God but he’d hate this.”

* * *

It was as if he was floating beneath the surface. Half aware of people, of voices. Of touches and whispers. Of hot and cold. Dim images and shadows and half-distinct faces. Sorelli, mostly. Philippe, in the corner of his eye. Noël, in and out, always quiet, always careful. Christine, once. Collections of pieces and he was too tired to stay awake, cold down to his bones but warm too, and always, somewhere in the back of his mind, a soft voice reminded him not to speak.

* * *

(Pneumonia, they told him, when he was well again. Pneumonia brought on by the haemorrhage, by the blood he had not been able to cough up.)

* * *

(He still carries the slim scar, from the incision Noël cut in his side, to push a tube into his lung and drain the fluid that was suffocating him.) 

(Mostly he remembers not being able to breathe, and the sharp shooting pain.)

* * *

Soft scrape of a blade against his skin, gentle touch of fingers to his chin. “…doesn’t like not being shaved…” A voice he always knew as well as his own, adamant and certain. His cheeks cool and damp, and the smoothing of a towel. Her face swam before him, eyes rimmed red, and he tried to breathe her name, tried to muster the strength, but she shushed him and pressed her finger to his lips. 

“It’s alright, Raoul, I’m here.” A kiss, pressed gentle, to the the back of his hand as she dimmed from view. “Just sleep.”

* * *

The waves crashing against the rocks. Splinters of timber and bone and water red with blood. 

The ridges of stitches impressions on his fingertips.

* * *

The room rolled and pitched around him and he gasped and coughed at the pain lancing through his side. An arm beneath his neck, raising him up and the air he sucked in was cool and clear but the room was still tilting, rocked by the wind, and beneath his head was a shoulder, an arm wrapped around him to keep him from slipping back beneath the waves.

* * *

 _“I swear I’m not going anywhere.” Faintly green eyes shining with concern._ _“I’ll read you every terrible poem I can find, if you want.”_

_His head spun if he lifted it, the headache pounding fresh if he tried to lift a book to read it, but Jack would keep him right, keep him from going insane._

_“So long as they’re not too awful.”_

_“Please. Give me some credit for taste.”_

* * *

“You should have told us.” 

“It wouldn’t have made a difference.” 

“I don’t care whether it would have made a difference or not! If we’d known we would have been ready. He mightn’t have gotten this bad.” 

“Sorelli—” 

“No. No I don’t care right now. I can’t listen to your logic. Look at him, Christine! How can you tell me this is right? How can you tell me he had to go through this?” 

A long silence. 

“You can’t. You can’t tell me.” A ragged breath, and a whispered, “he doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t.” 

“No, he doesn’t.” 

“Then why—” and her voice cracked, “why does he have to go through it?”

* * *

(It would be years before anyone told him, but there was a night his blood pressure dipped so low his pulse was barely perceptible, and Sorelli kept her fingers pressed to it all night, until her fingers were too numb to feel it. And when his breathing faltered, Noël was there to be sure it didn’t stop.)

* * *

 _Music from somewhere far away. The flash of a smile and shining blue eyes, faintly green. And a hand, slipping between his own._

_“It’s a crime that you don’t dance more often.”_

* * *

Dimly, through a haze, Sorelli leaning into Christine, their faces washed out and pale. “He’ll live,” Christine’s voice soft and low. “I promise you he’ll live.” 

The tears shone bright on Sorelli’s cheeks. 

He might have told them he was awake, that he could hear them, but he could not find his voice. 

The darkness swam back in, and washed them away.

* * *

Singing, soft and sweet in his ear, and a kiss, pressed light to his forehead.

* * *

 _"B_ _ut at my back I always hear, time’s_ _wingéd_ _chariot, hurrying near…”_

* * *

“…fever broken…” 

“…x-ray clearer…” 

“…wake when he’s ready…” 

“…all the rest he…”

* * *

It was a Sunday, when he came back to himself. A Sunday, he learned afterwards, and when he opened his eyes, everything was quiet. 

There were the softest breaths against his cheek, and a hand warm on top of his, and he was too tired to move, too tired and too heavy, but something deep inside of him whispered that he needed to see who those breaths belonged to, so he swallowed against the aching of his throat, and turned his head, slowly, carefully, and found Sorelli, Sorelli’s head sharing his pillow, her eyes closed. 

And he was so tired, but he kissed her forehead, and her eyelids flickered, and he breathed her name, his throat sore and voice hoarse from his illness, from disuse. 

Deep brown eyes looked into his, bleary with tiredness, with days of worry, and he felt a hand cup his cheek, gentle and careful. 

“Don’t try to speak,” she whispered, so soft, so low. “You need to be careful with yourself.” 

He nodded, and swallowed, and tears welled in her eyes. 

“You had me so frightened,” she whispered, and something that ached like guilt took root in his chest, as one tear slipped over the bridge of her nose. 

With a trembling finger, he brushed it away. 


	15. 15

He turned thirty on 6 January 1953.

He was home by then, had been home for six weeks, and still under orders to be careful and rest. His tuberculosis had been pronounced cured, all sign of active infection gone from his x-rays, gone from his blood, but he was still tired, tired and hollow from the haemorrhage, from the pneumonia.

From grieving Jack.

How could he celebrate his birthday, when Jack—

* * *

(Sorelli and Christine stayed with him, that first night he was home, and he slept between them, too exhausted to stay awake, but he surfaced to consciousness sometime in the night, could hear their soft breathing, and tears welled in his eyes, more than he could breathe against, and as he gasped quietly in the darkness all he could wonder was why he had to live. Why?)

* * *

He always meant to write something about Jack. He did write about his illness and his time in Newcastle, and it was published in a book that had a semi-decent circulation. He never told Christine about it, the young Christine of these years so very long on from that, not until recently, because it would be one more thing on her mind, and it might upset her, to know how ill he had been once, how close he came to not being here today, and she has always had enough on her mind without being upset by him and the things in his past.

So he didn’t tell her until recently, and when he did she hugged him and her eyes were damp.

(Poor girl, but she has been through too much.)

That he has lived to be ninety-four is something of a miracle, to his mind.

And he would have written about Jack. He tried, so many times, looked at his picture and looked down at blank paper and tried to shape ink on it, but the words would never come, and what did come never seemed enough. That he loved him and continued to love him, still, some part deep inside, in spite of his other lovers, the ones who came after, when he knew about himself. It was always Jack, somewhere in his heart, Jack, who had taught him how to love, who had shown him the beauty in himself, who had brought light into his life.

Jack.

What words could ever be enough?

* * *

(At Erik’s behest he has told him stories. And Erik often seems so young and so old at once, his distorted face and burning eyes, and he never could have had a son, but if he had, he would have liked him to grow up like Erik, with such kindness in his soul.)

(So he has told Erik stories, and some part of him knows that the words he has never been able to find, Erik will be able to frame.)

* * *

Even though it was late November when he left the hospital, Sorelli still insisted on daily walks by the beach.

All he wanted was to be left alone. To curl up tight in bed and try to forget how to breathe, and he almost resented her for it, resented her for bringing him out into the world, for trying to make him feel something other than the emptiness.

But she insisted that he needed to re-build his strength, and as she handed him his coat each morning there was no use in arguing with her.

(The cold still sank deep into his bones.)

* * *

He said something sharp to her, only once. Only one morning, and he cannot quite remember what it was, only that her eyes blazed at his words, and in a voice that was empty of all emotion she said, “you forget I’ve been where you are.”

It drove the air from his lungs, made him gasp, and she held her head high and stood up and left.

He sat there a long time, feeling only the pounding of his heart, the ugly wound Jack wore as he died swimming before his eyes until it became Philippe’s face, still and cold beneath his fingers and that stitched ridge above his eye, and he trembled as he stood, trembled as he went to find her.

Her face was splotched and red from crying, and she pulled him into her arms.

(“I’m sorry,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “I’m sorry.”)

* * *

It was a little easier, after that.

* * *

His thirtieth birthday and in another world Jack would have been there. But Jack was buried somewhere beneath the clay in Clare, and there were only Christine and Sorelli.

And Noël, bearing a bottle of chartreuse, and the excuse that he was checking up on his health, though he did not stay long, and even then Raoul suspected it to be a ruse, but he kept that to himself.

He can still see Noël’s expression, that almost-grimace, can hear his voice through the years, soft, and just a little tougher than normal.

_Birthdays have little to recommend them._

* * *

In hindsight, it was as good a birthday as it could have been.

* * *

The next night Sorelli’s play was opening at the Abbey, and Raoul would have gone to see it, if he had had the energy to leave his chair.

She had already forbidden him from attending, for the sake of not overstraining himself, but that would never have stopped him before. Before his illness, before Jack. But that evening the thought of being surrounded by people, of the heat of the theatre, of the closeness of everyone, was enough to make his heart pound hard.

To have to be out in the world— To be around those people he hadn’t seen since before his illness— Who could never know, never understand—

The very thought of it was more than he could stand.

As she left he smiled thinly at her, and wished her well, but when she hugged him it did nothing to close the hollowness inside.

* * *

It was Christine who forced the life back into him.

Christine, that evening, a Christine who has not come to be in her own time now but who must have been thirty-five then, Christine who took one look at him and decided enough was enough. It was one thing to grieve, quite another to let it control his life, so after Sorelli had left, after he had sat there staring at the flames crackling low in the fireplace so long his eyes were damp from the heat, he heard her sigh, and music wound around him soft and low.

The record player, that he hadn’t touched since before Newcastle. The gentle, familiar notes of ‘Stardust’.

He looked up at her standing before him, at her hand stretching out, and didn’t move an inch, couldn’t bring himself to.

She rolled her eyes, and took his hand.

“Get up off the parliamentary side of your arse,” and it was the strangest sort of sentence he had ever heard, “and get a little colour in your face.”

But the thought of moving, the thought of dancing, and _‘Stardust’_ playing of all songs—

“Come on.” And she tugged his hand so that he had no choice but to stand. “You’re going to dance,” she said, “or so help me but I will play this song over and over until you cannot bear to hear it another minute.”

He might have said, “I can’t bear to hear it now,” but Jack had liked this song, had loved this song, had once made him dance to it around their room when he was still half-stumbling with the vertigo, and the thought of Jack, that Jack would want him to dance—

He nodded dumbly, and let her draw him into his arms.

(It was hardly dancing, them swaying slowly around the parlour, hardly dancing or much of anything at all, but every time the song finished he went to the player and put it back to the start, and when the tears came to his eyes, as she held him close, she didn’t mind at all, when they slipped down into her hair.)

* * *

(It was years later, forty years and more, while he ranted to her about historical inaccuracy in film after seeing _Michael Collins_ , that she laughed and reminded him of how blank he’d looked when she told him to get up off the parliamentary side of his arse, and he snorted then to think that she’d quoted a film at him that she knew he would one day hate, and the snort turned to laughter, at her and a little at his younger self, for being so damn stubborn even in grief.)

(He has still never liked _Michael Collins_.)

* * *

Sometime around the middle of January it possessed him that he wasn’t happy with the library in the house in Malahide. It started by just rearranging a few things, moving the old medical books to where he couldn’t see them anymore and be reminded of their presence. And then he needed to fill the space left by them, so he brought in the history books from his office. Then he wasn’t happy that they were all arranged by surname under general topics and he took everything off the shelves and drew up a map to rearrange it by general topic and specific topic and then by year of publication and surname.

It was early February by the time he was finished, with Christine and Sorelli enlisted as his helpers, but he looked at it all at the end and didn’t feel any bit better for having done it.

* * *

The restlessness that compelled him to rearrange the library (and his study, and his collection of records, and his wardrobe) stayed with him, even through his daily walks on the beach, even through finally bracing himself enough to go to the theatre and see Sorelli’s play. He walked to Glasnevin to visit Philippe on one cool day in late March, but still there was this thing burning inside of him that it was impossible to shake.

It was April. And he sat into the car that he hadn’t touched in more than a year, that Sorelli had driven to keep it from getting damp, to keep the engine in order, and with only a note left to tell her that he was going, he left.

* * *

Clare.

Clare, where Jack’s grandfather lived.

* * *

He had only the vaguest idea where the graveyard was, that only because Harry had clipped out the death notice and sent it to him, and Sorelli hid it until he had recovered enough from the haemorrhage to remember that Jack was dead, recovered enough that the shock would not trigger another one.

By the sea.

Overlooking the vast Atlantic, perched high on a cliff.

Such a place for a graveyard.

And he thought of a cottage that they had talked about having, and decided there was no where else Jack would rather be.

He looked down at that name carved into the stone before him, and the pain in his chest was such it felt as if he was haemorrhaging still.

* * *

He should have brought flowers.

He only thought of them afterwards.

* * *

To have deprived Jack of flowers—

* * *

He drove home. Drove home from Clare so fast it would have put Noël to shame. He had considered visiting Jack’s grandfather, but the thought of seeing that old man, the thought of going to that man who had buried the grandson he thought the world of, never knowing he was a homosexual, to go to him and lie and say that they had only been _friends_ —

It was more than he could take. Too much. All of it too much.

* * *

It was after one a.m. when he stumbled in the door, legs too weak to support him anymore. After one a.m. and the house was quiet but he knew Sorelli would be waiting for him, knew she could hardly be sleeping.

And he found her, sitting in an armchair by the fire, reading a newspaper, or pretending to be. She looked up from it when he came in, and her eyes widened, her face paling, and before he could say anything, before he could open his mouth, she set the paper down and stood up and came to him, and drew him into her arms.

The tears that had been threatening beneath the surface, that had tried to blind his vision the whole way home, came hot and fast, and they sank to the floor, his head on her shoulder, her face in his hair and as he gasped for breath she tightened her arms around him, and rocked him and neither of them spoke, but neither of them needed to.

* * *

(It was the first time he had truly slept, slept without seeing Jack’s pale face, slept without waking sweating, and when, at last, he did wake, it was there on the floor, still in Sorelli’s arms, to the grey light of dawn, the fire burned out.)

(For the first time since Jack died, he felt light.)


	16. 16

He still has the sketchbooks, the photographs. Even the photographs of other men, from before he met Jack, Jack’s old lovers, and he had considered trying to track them down, that maybe they would want them, but Jack had left this collection to _him_ , and the trust in such an act was such that he could not bring himself to part with them. Not then, not then in the months after he died and not in the years and decades afterwards. 

He has not taken them out in such a long time, has kept them safe in his study, never far from him. And it is not that he has not been able to bear looking at them, because the hollow of grief has long since closed, and though there remains an ache it is not enough to keep him from breathing, not enough that it possesses him every moment like it once did. It is more that he just has no longing to see them, no longing to see those other men, no longing to see himself through Jack’s eyes, rendered carefully on paper. 

Himself at twenty-nine sometimes feel like such a stranger, when it is so very far in the past. And sometimes it feels like he has changed very little, in the six and a half decades since. 

He takes them out tonight, the sketchbooks, and settles with them at the fire. He has found himself wondering, lately, whether or not he should leave a note for Christine to burn them after his day, or whether or not one of them should be buried with him. But he thinks, now, it is better to leave them, better to let her have them, if she wants them. Her feelings about history and the pieces of it are much the same as his, and she has not met Jack, not yet, but there will come a time, not that far from now, when she will travel back in time and he will introduce them, and they will mean all the more to her then, made more by having met him, though they would mean the world to her now, just for the fact that _he_ has had them for so long, for the fact that he is in them. 

There is nothing in them that it would not do for her to see. Jack was always very tasteful in his art. But still there are one or two that are just a little more than the others, and he wonders what she will think when she sees them. 

Perhaps it is best that he will not know.

* * *

That year, 1953, was a year of learning to be again. It was not that the world had changed but that he had changed, and had to learn how to exist in it again, knowing what he did about himself. Not just his homosexuality, and learning to exist within that took him years, both inside of and outside relationships. Not just his new limitations, the breathlessness from the cavity in his lung, that Noël warned him would never go away, because lung tissue when it’s destroyed is gone forever and no one could know that as well as Noël. Not just the having to be extra careful, his increased risk of pneumonia, the way a cold could drain him so much more than he was used to. Not just the new steadiness of the vertigo ebbing away or the returning hearing in his ear (never fully returned, always a little weaker on the left than the right, ever since.) 

But the hollowness. The space within him, where Jack had been and should still have been. He had tasted love, and the very light seemed different because of it, the flowers a little brighter. 

Sorelli gave him the flowers they presented to her on closing night, and he pressed the petals of some, and hung others to dry, their dark red deepening almost to black. And when they were dried, he slipped one into Jack’s sketchbook (where its dust lives still) and gave one to Sorelli. 

Two he brought with him to Clare, and buried in the sand looking out on the sea.

* * *

It was September before he went back to Trinity, and something about the walls made it seem a little greyer. A book of Keats sitting on the desk in his office made his throat tighten, and if his eyes prickled then it was surely only the dust. 

He hid it away and drew shaky breaths.

* * *

Skeff brought him a complete collection of Proust in the original French, as a welcome back gift, never mind they have never shared a department. 

If he were a suspicious man, he might have thought either Noël or Sorelli had put him up to it, to occupy his mind.

* * *

He still has that old complete collection of Proust. Reading it was an adventure in translation, with dictionaries and juggling verb tenses, and it took him the whole of two years. 

It lives on the shelf beside Marx, which _did_ come from Noël one year. And Beckett, from Sorelli.

* * *

Harry came to see him, on the day after Jack’s first anniversary. 

He had driven to Newcastle, to walk the grounds, and spend a little time in the place where Jack’s life ended, the place that held the whole of their love. He had sworn he would never go back there, but something pulled him to, something that ached to be close to him in any way he could. So he did, and the grounds were just as he remembered, and whether that was better or worse he could not decide. 

Sorelli joined him in his bed that night, for the first time in months, and neither of them spoke, just leaned close to each other, and it was a little easier to breathe. 

It was the next day that Harry came to him. 

“I was wondering how you are,” he said, and the very sight of him was enough that the tears came, unbidden.

* * *

Harry’s visits were to become regular over that winter. Once a week, and he always managed a smile, and often they spoke of Jack, and how he had been, and it was hard to breathe, at first, around the ache in his chest, but it was easier in time, to hear of Jack scaling trees to get the perfect sketch and waiting in the cold all night to catch the sunrise just right in a photograph, to hear of him perched on cliffs and in graveyards, writing, and thinking, and dreaming. To hear him made real, by someone who had known him, truly known him, and not only loved him as he was dying, loved him when he was trapped within walls. 

He was still taking his daily walks, had come to enjoy them and the space it brought his head, and sometimes Christine joined him, if she was in his time, and they might not speak of anything at all. And sometimes it was Sorelli, and the quiet of her was a little different, a little more introspective. And he often went alone, but that winter Harry came to join him, several times, and they did not speak but sometimes they caught each other’s eyes, and grinned as if there were a joke only they could know. 

That Harry, too, was a homosexual, he already knew. 

That Harry had loved Jack, once, he knew without asking.

* * *

His birthday, and a small party just on a whim, hardly even a party. A bottle of chartreuse and the record player, and Sorelli and Christine. 

And Harry. 

At the end of the night, as they swayed slowly before the fireplace, after Sorelli and Christine had slipped upstairs—as they swayed in each other’s arms, so close he could feel Harry’s heart beating in his chest, as their lips met for the first time, there was nothing he would change about it, nothing he would change, because that kiss felt wholly right.

* * *

It was that they were both a little broken. 

It was that they both needed someone. 

It was that they were both mourning Jack.

* * *

Harry slipped into his life as if he had belonged there from the first moment. 

Looking back, now, he wonders that it had seemed so easy.

* * *

When he woke, tangled in the sheets of his bed, the morning after that first night, and saw the sandy glow of Harry’s eyelashes in the morning sunlight, he wondered if this was how it was meant to be. 

That he did not feel guilt, for having loved him in the night, was the strangest part.

* * *

That spring of 1954, Sorelli turned forty. She bought a cottage in Wicklow, and moved down there to live in the countryside, with the quiet and the trees and he visited her once a week and they often met for tea in Dublin, but it was not the same, her being so far away. 

And he missed her. Missed her in a way he could hardly admit, when she had been the closest thing he had had to family for so long. But he had Harry, and Harry kept the big house from being empty. 

There was always music, always callers, always stories and poetry and tales of politics, and photographs in some stage of development, and that he saw Sorelli less, that he saw Christine less, it seemed only right, when his days and nights were so full.

* * *

Four years he was with Harry. Four years, and he does not regret them, not even now, not even after it ended the way it did, slowly with fractures and not a great schism. No recriminations, just a parting, as if they had always understood that it could only be temporary. 

He is not sure whether or not he ever really loved Harry. He cared about him, certainly, enjoyed his company. His laugh and the light in those green eyes, the way his fingers would skim his side, skim his thigh. It was something like love, maybe. Something that wanted to be love, and could have been, in a different time. If they were not who they were. If Jack was not always, somehow, still between them.

* * *

That last day in early February 1957. The misting drizzle outside. They had been parting, slowly, for weeks, Harry’s things leaving the house, one-by-one. 

There was a woman, he knew. Emma, but he had never met her. Never felt inclined to. 

“I think—” and Harry’s voice was soft. 

“Yes.” There was gravel in his throat, because he had not slept properly in weeks. 

One soft last kiss, and Harry was gone.

* * *

He drove to Wicklow and spent the night with Sorelli, and there were no tears and few words, but he knew she knew, and she squeezed his hand, and held him close.

* * *

There was an election, and it kept him same. 

Noël, after losing his seat in 1954 thanks to that decision to join Fianna Fáil (and they discussed it many times, the rights and wrongs of the matter, the necessity of being in a party, but Raoul still feels it was a lapse in judgement on his part), was running as an independent, and hitting the campaign trail gave Raoul something to do, kept him out of the house, kept him from dwelling on Harry. 

With Sorelli at his side, and Christine hopping in and out, it was almost like 1948 again, almost like being young again, almost like the nine years in between had never happened, and if he went to tears the night Noël was confirmed elected, if more of those tears were over the ache for Harry, the sudden desperate new grief for Jack, then Sorelli didn’t comment, just drew him into her arms, and kissed his forehead, and promised without words that they would get through it. 

(Someone snapped a photo of them, like that, him weeping and her holding him, and put it in the papers, but she only smiled at him, when she saw it, and told him it doesn’t matter a damn what the world thinks.) 

Of all the times he ached for Philippe, that was one of the worst. 


	17. 17

He took up a post in Belfast. 

It was not that he was running. It was not that he was afraid he would ever bump into Harry in the street and needed to be sure of avoiding him. It was more that he just needed to _go_ , to be somewhere else for a little while. To be someone else. 

He might have gone to London or Paris or even America. There would be different things for him in each of those places, each of them a world away from Dublin. But the aversion to boats that he acquired after Philippe’s murder was also an aversion to planes, and the thought of being in a tiny capsule thousands of miles above the earth was enough to make him break out in a cold sweat. 

So he took up a post in Belfast, and gave the house in Malahide to Sorelli to use as a base in Dublin, and turned his back on it all. 

* * *

Turning his back on it all was not to last long. He enjoyed Belfast, he did. The libraries, the people, the university. The Unionist perspective towards the Irish State was far from his own, and while he had no problem with the British people, he did find it uncomfortable with his southern accent, with the Union Jacks flying high. 

The highlight of it was Hugh, another professor in the history department, who kissed him when they were both far gone on wine. But the memory of Harry and how it ended meant he did not feel up to getting into any real relationship, and he couldn’t bring himself to tell Hugh about Jack, felt it best to keep his time in the sanatorium to himself, so though they shared several pleasant nights and early mornings, he knew it would never become anything more. 

Eleven months of Belfast, and when the news came that Noël and Jack McQuillan were thinking about starting a new political party, he decided the time had come to go. 

* * *

The National Progressive Democrats had aspirations of becoming a great deal more than they were. Only Noël and McQuillan in the Dáil, but they were argumentative enough for ten men, and the parliamentary reports always had something entertaining when one or the other of them got going. 

It was the first time Raoul ever officially joined a party. The first time he ever actually considered standing for a party, but he decided his talents lay more with letter writing and articles, the backroom work of discussing potential amendments, than being directly under the spotlight. 

It was tempting, true, to consider running in any future general election, but the whirlwind of newspaper campaigns and debates was enough to keep him entertained on top of his research. 

Especially when that research included analysis of three previous elections and their newspaper coverage. 

Another man might be all electioned-out over it. For Raoul it was just enough to keep him from entertaining ideas of his own political career. 

* * *

His other project was a book about Philippe. 

* * *

Twenty years since his brother’s death. How could he let that go unacknowledged? 

What better person could there be, to write a tribute to him? 

It was a duty, not a burden. One of the most important duties he could ever undertake. 

* * *

Sorelli, when she heard of his idea, nodded and agreed that it was perfect. 

“There’s never a day that I don’t think of him,” and her voice was soft as she squeezed his hand. “I think he would be happy for you to write something.” 

Hearing her gave him all the courage he needed. 

* * *

Twenty years since Philippe died, and he set pen to paper. 

Handwriting it, first, seemed only right. Seemed more significant than simply sitting at his typewriter, and letting his fingers dance across the keys. 

He would have to type it sometime, but the first draft should be his own. 

* * *

He wrote about their parents, their father in the war. Wrote about their sisters who had died, and left out his own illness, left out the fear that must have been Philippe’s, of something happening to him. He wrote, a little, about himself as a child, but wrote a good deal more about Philippe taking him to the beach and Philippe teaching him to sail and to ride horses. Wrote about how his brother had loved books, and music, and theatre, how he supported the republican cause and helped to hide Irish Volunteers from the Black and Tans during the War of Independence, the stories that had come down to him. 

He wrote about Sorelli, and how Philippe had loved her and intended to marry her, and she told him things to put in, about Philippe writing her letters and visiting her every day in the hospital. 

There was a long, late night, where they sat together looking through those old letters, and for the first time the tears didn’t come but that ache was still just as heavy in his chest. 

He wrote everything he could about the day Philippe died, about the stitched gash on his forehead, and left out that he could not really remember finding out. But he put in the inquiry, and Noël telling him about it when he was in hospital with the appendicitis, and how it seemed like it was the best news he could ever have gotten. 

* * *

Sorelli read it all, his first reader. And afterwards she hugged him with tears in her eyes, and neither of them spoke a word. 

* * *

Christine read it, and squeezed his hand, and said, “it’s still in the library in my time.” 

Her time. Seventy years from then. And something lurched inside him, some unnameable thing, to know his brother would still matter, in that far distant future. 

He squeezed her hand back. “Thank you.”

* * *

November 1959, and the story of Philippe’s life and death became a bestseller. 

_The Irish Times_ gave it an excellent review, and the _I_ _rish Independent_ included photos from its launch, and both of them caught him for interviews. 

He was interviewed on the radio, and an English journalist came to ask him all about it. 

He interviewed Sorelli too, and that was only fair. 

There were two book signings, and Noël started a debate in the Dáil about the victims of renegade republican violence that made it into all the papers, and Christine snorted when she read the report of it and refused to tell him why she was so amused. 

“Historian’s joke,” she said, mischief shining in her eyes, and it was all he could do not to laugh.

* * *

New Year’s Eve, that year, was the closest thing to a family gathering. 

Himself and Sorelli. Christine, and her father. 

It was only his third time meeting Alex Daaé (that it didn’t leave him completely faint was something of a wonder, considering how he felt the first two times he met the man, one time traveler is quite enough at any given time), and they left the ladies dancing by the fire to go into the library and look at books of old maps. Cartography was, it turned out, a special interest of Alex’s, and when Raoul mentioned the old bound diaries of his great-great granduncle (or something like that) who was involved in making the first Ordnance Survey maps, Alex’s eyes lit up. 

In that moment, Raoul could see exactly where Christine got it from. 

* * *

Looking at old maps and diaries, and sipping chartreuse, was the best New Year’s Eve he had had in a long time. 

* * *

1960 brought film deals for Sorelli, photographs of Christine sitting in his study looking completely at home there, a series of interviews with veterans of the War of Independence for his new book. It brought going to dances and after parties with Sorelli and touring around the country with Christine while Sorelli was in London. It brought a whole host of wonderful things, and an easiness in his heart that was something strange and new. 

Mostly, 1960 brought Darius. 

It was, all in all, a good year. 

* * *

Darius was a professor of literature, over from Cambridge. His special area was the Napoleonic Wars and their appearance or lack thereof in novels of the time. He had an affection for Austen that reminded Raoul of a girl he had briefly been with in his Trinity days. Marietta, or something like that. 

He liked his whiskey neat and his cigars expensive, and he had three freckles on his neck that were like a constellation. 

Raoul came to know those three freckles very well. 

* * *

They bumped into each other in the library. Literally bumped into each other. Raoul was reading through _The Irish Times_ as he walked to where the books he knew he wanted would be. And he could admit even then that it was a poor decision to read and walk at the same time, and liable to lead to any number of potential accidents, including falling over the stools for reaching the books on the high shelves (and those bruises had taken weeks to heal). 

In his defense, Noël and McQuillan had caused nothing but trouble in the Dáil the day before over the University College Dublin Bill, and the very description of Noël “taking the bit between his teeth” and “storming on” to make a two-hour speech was enough to leave him close to giggling despite his best efforts to remain composed. And that was on the third reading. 

(The first time he actually had to stop reading, because the laughter was making him cry.) 

He could not be blamed for being quite distracted, as he rounded the corner of the shelves and collided with the new literature professor. 

His nose smarted something fierce, but he was just relieved it wasn’t bleeding. 

“Sorry.” 

“Sorry.” 

Two whispered words, and the flash of a bright smile, and that was it. 

* * *

They went for coffee, and laughed, together, over the descriptions in the newspaper. Before he knew it, coffee with Darius was a daily affair, every morning, and they talked about the weather and the news and their research and anything that came to mind. 

It was two weeks later that Sorelli came home from London, and she took one look at Raoul and cocked her brow. 

“What’s his name?” 

* * *

His protests that _no,_ he and Darius _were not_ involved, and furthermore he had _no interest_ in being involved, fell on deaf ears. 

Sorelli just gave him a knowing smile and asked, “when can I meet him?” 

* * *

Darius was more than a little taken aback at meeting _t_ _he_ Sorelli, but they hit it off, and spent most of the evening discussing Beckett. 

Christine smiled at Raoul, and squeezed his hand and said, “I met someone in a library once, too.” 

(One of the first times she told him something meaningful, something important about her own time, and his name had been (would be?) Nollaig, and he was a law student, and she left out the part that he had died but Raoul could see the sadness in her eyes and thought it best not to pry.) 

(When the time did come, that the younger Christine came to his door and told him she had met someone in a library called Nollaig, he thought of that day nearly fifty years earlier, and of Darius, and the soft smile she had worn, and hugged her.) 

* * *

Coming straight-out and asking Darius if he was a homosexual was not something that it was in any way appropriate to do. He had his suspicions, a feeling in his bones, and Sorelli certainly had hers, and if Christine had any she kept them to herself, but it was not something he could just _ask_ . It was not decent and besides, if he was wrong and he asked, then there was every possibility of Darius becoming suspicious of _him_ , and maybe having him arrested. 

So he could not ask, for all that he wondered, and not for the first time he thought of how easy it had been with Jack, how easy it had been with Harry because of Jack, that they could not have such a question over each other. 

Would that it could always be as simple as that. 

* * *

He spent six months wondering over it. Wondering if the vagaries of fate that caused Christine to be a time traveler could also, maybe, cause him to meet his future lover by bumping into him in the library. He thought often of those hands, fingers marred with paper cuts and the touch gentle from turning pages, the skin so dark beside his. Thought of that smile and how it shone. Thought of those dark green eyes, and how they might look in early morning light. 

Thought of the constellation freckles on Darius’ neck, and what it might be like to kiss them. 

Thought of the full softness of his lips, of the line of his arm and how he ached to brush his fingers over it. 

(If he thought, more than once, of what it would be like to feel those hands on him, to feel those arms around him, laying him down, if he touched himself with eyes half-closed and whimpered into the darkness to the thoughts of those hands, those lips, that body of firm muscle pressed close to him, then nobody needed to know.) 

(If he woke, more than once, from dreams of looking into those eyes, of gasping into that mouth, then that was for him alone to know.)

* * *

Noël told him he didn’t quite seem himself, and he didn’t feel himself but he lied and said he was just busy with his research. 

Sorelli offered to ask Darius for him, to “put you out of your misery.” 

Christine told him that everything would work out for the best in the end, and one of her classic cryptic statements was enough to make him snort. 

Darius’ fingers, as they brushed the back of his hand handing him a cup of tea, made him shiver.

* * *

Belfast in late October. 

A conference, the trees blazing orange and gold, the sun burning them in its light and the damp in the air of promised rain to make the world glisten. 

He and Darius, and a bottle of wine. 

This time, he would know who made the first move. 

(Darius, stretching across the sofa.) 

“I’m sorry,” breathed into his mouth, those deep green eyes shining in apology. 

His hand cupping the nape of that neck. 

“Don’t be.” 

Their lips, meeting again, Darius pressing him down onto the sofa, the weight of him, the heat, the pressure between his legs, and he spread himself, just a little, just so they could fit better, and Darius’ hand slipped up beneath his shirt, and rested, warm, on his belly. 

A question, a promise, a whisper. 

He closed his eyes, and sighed.

* * *

Afterwards, lying together, Darius’ fingers tracing his scar (lightly, lightly), half-dozing in the warm afterglow. 

“You loved someone before, didn’t you?” Darius' voice little more than a whisper. 

“I did.” Jack, before and still, somewhere deep inside. Harry, in some way. 

“Tell me about him.” 

_Sing to me the story of…_

So he did. 


	18. 18

When he told Christine about Jack, this twenty-first century Christine who is so young and who seems so much a girl compared to the Christines he has known, he did not tell her about Darius. 

He almost did. He thought about it. But he couldn’t do it. Jack is in his blood, in his heart, but Darius is deep in his bones. Darius, who he loved for so long, who he had for so long. How could he find words to tell her about Darius? 

So he kept the fact of Darius to himself, and decided it was for the best. 

There is so much of her future she knows or can guess at. So much of his and his past, so much of Erik’s and she will find it all out in time and too soon, and that’s no way to live. Why give her something else to know of too soon? 

Let her have something, one thing, to learn of as a normal person. 

Let her pretend, for a little while.

* * *

And it was wonderful with Darius. Every moment, even when it didn’t always seem so at the time. 

It was, he fancied, the happiest he had ever been, since before Philippe died. Since he was a boy. 

Darius made him feel like a boy again, and gave him a hundred reasons to be happy every day.

* * *

When they returned from Belfast, after those kisses, after those nights, and Darius gave up his rented accommodation to move in with him, they told everyone it was to save money. 

Sorelli smirked, and kissed Darius’ hand, and promised him he would be very happy. 

(She also threatened him, that if he hurt Raoul, then she knew people who could make him disappear.) 

(That bit Raoul only found out afterwards, when Darius got very drunk and told him.)

* * *

It hit him when he turned thirty-eight in January 1961 that he had lived to be older than Philippe. 

He had known it, in an intellectual sort of way, for two and a half years, and forbidden himself from thinking on it. Running away to Belfast had helped and maybe that was part of it. Taking up with Noël and McQuillan in the NPDs had helped. Writing the book had helped, and so had Darius, and the wondering over him. But that January there was no escaping it, that sharp fact. 

Philippe had died at thirty-five, could never grow older than thirty-five. Had had his life stolen from him, at thirty-five. 

And he had been sixteen. And now he was thirty-eight, and growing older by the day. 

How could that be right?

* * *

The life he was living stolen, tainted, by the ending of Philippe’s.

* * *

He stood in Glasnevin, looking down at that headstone, and couldn’t think of a word to say. So he went and got drunk, and wept in Darius’ arms.

* * *

Noël could understand. Noël, not yet as old as his father had been when TB had claimed his life but as old as his mother had been when it happened. A good deal older than his brother had been, when he died after a surgeon’s risk. 

“I think a lot about Jody,” and his voice was soft, the line of his mouth curved, just a little, downwards.

* * *

Stolen lives and what could they do about it? Everything they were living, every choice they had ever made, framed within the tragedies of their pasts.

* * *

“I try not to think about it,” Sorelli’s face pale, and serious. Sorelli, older than both of her parents had been. Older than Philippe. Older than him. Older, just a little, than Noël. 

“I wish I could say it gets easier,” Christine, and her eyes were gentle, her fingers soft, as she squeezed his hand. 

Darius bundled him into his arms, and let him stay there as long as he wanted.

* * *

It was Darius, in the end, who pulled him out of it. 

Darius, who insisted on their going to dinner, insisted on reminding him how infuriating it was that they could not hold hands in public, that they could not kiss and press themselves close. 

Darius, who insisted on their going to the theatre, even when Sorelli was not performing, and with his hand warm on Raoul’s lap in the darkness as they waited for the curtain to lift, reminded him of the thrum of his heart, reminded him that here was someone else, someone who thought the world of him. 

Darius who brought him to the pictures, and discreetly twined their fingers as films played, most of them more than he could even begin to focus on. 

Darius, who held him close at night, and in the early morning, and helped him to feel real, helped him to feel whole, as if he had substance, as if he would not simply blow away. 

Darius who loved him, and let him love him in return.

* * *

He was thirty-eight and older than Philippe would ever get to be, but Philippe would want him to be happy, and to enjoy every moment of it.

* * *

He took Darius dancing. 

They could not dance in public, so it was just them, drunk and stumbling around the parlour, the records low and their voices whispers in each other’s ears, breathless and giggling and full of love for each other, so much love. And they would sink to the floor breathless and giddy and make love there by the fire. 

They danced in the attic and danced in the garden in the still of the night and danced in Sorelli’s cottage in Wicklow and would have danced on the flat tin roof of any shed they found, if they could have gotten up there. And they danced beneath the stars, turning soft and slow in each other’s arms, and there in the grass, with the moon their only light, they would undress each other and kiss and touch each other in a way that the first men surely must have touched, when they learned to love. Gentle and careful and tentative, each gasp a wonder, a blessing, each moan swallowed by the other’s mouth. And they would trace each other’s skin, trace their scars, press themselves close and with the sweat on their skin and the taste of the other in their mouths it was like a prayer to any god that might be listening. Not a sacrifice, but a dedication. 

How could it be wrong, to fill each other with such happiness? Such peace? 

(“It’s not wrong,” Sorelli said, her eyes blazing. “It’s not wrong. It’s the most special thing in the world. They just refuse to let themselves see it.”)

* * *

Darius made him feel real again, and as he pressed kisses soft and slow to the crease of his neck, he know that was all that mattered in the world.

* * *

(The night Darius came to him, sitting in the library, wearing nothing but a dressing gown, and proceeded to part it, careful and delicate to reveal just a strip of dark skin, the trail of hair at his navel, just to make Raoul’s throat try as he tried to read Shelley, was the night Raoul knew he was the luckiest man in the world.)

* * *

Turning thirty-nine did not seem so terrible, when he had grown into being older than Philippe.

* * *

It was ten years, that year, since his tuberculosis. Ten years since he had realized about himself. Ten years since he had almost died. 

Ten years since he had loved and lost Jack. 

It could have driven him mad. Might have, maybe, if he had not learned to love someone else. 

He wrote a short tribute for _The Irish Times_ , a letter to mark the occasion. To Noël, and his stubbornness and hospital building, and the blood transfusion service. To modern medicine and its wonder drugs. To Sorelli, for keeping him sane. A letter just to record it, and he could not mention Jack but the letter was enough to cause a flood. All these letters in the newspaper, from people who would have died, if it not been for the drugs, for the hospitals, for the vaccinations, for what Noël had done. And of all the things he ever did, it was that flood of letters that he was proudest of. That people might see, and might understand. 

Darius clipped them out, every one of them, and put them in a scrapbook. 

“So the world never forgets,” he said, and Raoul’s vision blurred as he kissed him.

* * *

(Christine will find those letters one day, he knows. And will make a collection of them, and more. To remind the world.) 

(And he knows because she told him, a future version of her come back who had already done it. One of the few pieces of the future she ever told him, and it was 27 May 1997, and Noël was dead and Sorelli too, and when the tears came that he had been bottling for days, she held him as he wept.)

* * *

September, and Darius offered to go with him to Clare, to Jack’s grave. 

Ten years to the day since he had died, but Raoul had to go alone. So he kissed him as he left, and this time he made sure to bring flowers. And as the sunset made the water of the Atlantic burn gold, and he set those flowers down upon the grave carrying that precious name and those dates, he pressed a kiss to the stone and whispered, “Thank you.” 

_Thank you for loving me._

_Thank you for letting me love you._

_Thank you for sending him into my life._

* * *

(Darius hugged him. “Better?” And he smiled. “Better.”)

* * *

It was an accident with a ladder. 

A stupid, foolish accident, and if he had only waited until Darius was home then it never would have happened. 

But he didn’t wait, and he doesn’t even remember most of what happened, only being cold, only the room swimming in and out of view, only the burning pain in his leg that made him scream when he moved it. 

A concussion. A serious one, he learned afterwards, when he could keep his thoughts in order. A concussion and broken ribs, and one badly broken leg that had needed surgery, resulting in the limp he would have for the rest of his life. 

Sorelli’s face was the first one he saw, that he could remember seeing, blanched pale in the hospital. And all he wanted was Darius, Darius, to tell him he would be alright, to kiss him and hold his hand. But Darius, when he came, could do neither of those things, and his eyes were rimmed red from crying, and his face was blurred with Raoul’s own tears. 

He slept and dreamt of Philippe, swinging him around to stop him crying after he fell from a tree, and woke to Noël, his face stern, consulting a chart. 

“You need to be more careful,” and there was something in his face that Raoul only realized afterwards was concern.

* * *

There was something Sorelli wasn’t telling him, that much was clear. 

He had been in hospital three days, as far as he could tell, and his head was finally beginning to feel more his own, which was why he could tell she wasn’t telling him something. It was a certain cast to her eye, a tilt to her head, and only for he had spent years studying each of her expressions he never would have been able to tell. But there was something she wasn’t telling him, so he resolved to ask her. 

“What is it?” And his voice was still hoarse, with tiredness and pain and the heaviness of the morphine and whatever other drugs they were giving him, and it was all he could do just to roll his head on the pillow, and look her in the eye. “What are you hiding?” 

She looked as if she still didn’t want to tell him, but so help him he had to _know,_ and he shifted as if he would try to move, try to lift himself, and her eyes flashed and her hands on his shoulders pressed him gently back down. 

“I’ll tell you if you promise not to move.” 

An easy bargain, and she probably knew she was playing into his feeble plan, but it was good enough for him. 

“I promise.” 

“All right.” And she sighed. “You remember those missiles Russia was sending to Cuba…”

* * *

The date was 24 October 1962. 

In later years, it would come to be known as part of the Cuban Missile Crisis. There was a march in Dublin over it that would come to be seen as some sort of historic event, and argued over for decades. 

Such facts were far from his head, when she showed him _The Irish Times_ _,_ which had a photo on the front of Noël Browne being attacked by police dogs. 

And one inside, of two dogs attacking Darius.

* * *

They were all right, that was the main thing. They were all right and she reminded him of that repeatedly even as panic threatened to overwhelm him that Darius had been attacked, _Darius_ , and it was only when Darius came to see him, when he could squeeze his hand and look into his eyes and see that he was not lying that he could believe him, that he could breathe again, and if there were tears in both of their eyes then neither of them mentioned them. 

A march in Dublin against the crisis and both Noël and Darius attacked over it, and him, _him_ , broke up after falling from a ladder. 

Such a time to be stuck in bed. 

It was almost laughable. 

But they were all right, and when, with the screens around his bed, Darius kissed him, carefully on the lips, it was the first time in days that he felt normal. 


	19. 19

He was still on crutches for his fortieth birthday.

When he lamented, to himself more so than anyone else, that he couldn’t go dancing, Sorelli saw fit to remind him that he could have hurt himself an awful lot worse.

And then added that as she had spent her twenty-fifth birthday with her leg in a _cage_ and confined to bed in Steevens’ Hospital, that he really couldn’t complain.

Darius watched this exchange with a single raised eyebrow, but elected not to comment.

(When he did get off the crutches, three weeks later, and was hobbling around again with a leg that ached if it got too cold, Darius did take him dancing, though it was only in the parlour, and it was only the two of them there.)

(Afterwards they lay each other down in bed and kissed and touched in a way they had not done since his fall, and that was the best belated present he could have gotten.)

* * *

He’d suspected for a while that Noël wasn’t quite himself. He was more tired, more reticent, a good deal slower climbing stairs. And it was easy to pretend that it was from work, from trying to do too much, so he didn’t say anything and kept his own counsel. But Sorelli commented on it, and McQuillan, and Darius who didn’t know Noël as well as they did but knew him well enough by then. And Christine, when she came and learned it was February 1963, had a slight flicker of something in her face that was gone as soon as he blinked.

It was then that he knew it wasn’t mere tiredness.

* * *

It was, as it happened, a relapse of his tuberculosis. It was not the first time. It was, by Raoul’s own estimate, the fourth time. Noël himself said the fifth, and seemed frustrated more than anything at having to rest.

Though he did smile, just slightly, and say, “the newest drugs work wonders.”  
Not just streptomycin, not anymore.

Raoul could admit that was a relief.

(His own hearing never did completely recover, and when he has not slept well, the world can swim a bit, as if to remind him of how lucky he is, that he recovered as well as he did from his own illness.)

* * *

It was only a couple of months before Noël was back to himself, working too hard and causing trouble in the Dáil. The whole thing did make Raoul wonder though. If Noël, who knew all about TB, who had spent twenty years treating it and saving people (saving him, even), who had legislated and brought things in to prevent it and find it in time, if he could suffer so many relapses, then what was there keeping him, Raoul, from suffering one?

Sheer dumb luck? Or was it a sign of some sort of Fate keeping him alive?

He has never been a man for believing in Fate. Not even knowing Christine as he does. Not even with the way his whole life has worked out, seeming almost charmed that he could survive such things as he has. But he did wonder, in that spring of 1963, if maybe there were greater forces at play than mere men and their luck.

No wonder the Romantics could seem almost half-mad, if these sort of things sometimes crossed their minds.

* * *

He kept his ruminations to himself, that year, but he did write a story or two teasing them out, just a little. And neither of them were ever meant to be published, only ever meant as a way for him to try to get his thoughts in order, but he wonders, now, after so many years, if maybe he should have put them out in the world. If maybe that was a path his life could have taken, becoming an author of fiction. Perhaps not all that strange for a historian. So much of what he has always done is piecing together the shards of people’s lives, of their actions, to try and find reason.

Maybe he could have made a good writer, if he had chosen to try.

Too late now to wonder and besides, he is happier with his contributions to the study of history. He might have lost focus, if he had spent too much energy in diversifying.

* * *

November 1963 started with Noël and McQuillan wrapping up the NPDs and joining the Labour Party (more correct to say they were finally allowed to join the Labour Party), and before it ended the American President was dead.

Not that the two events were linked in any way greater than having taken place within a given span of time, but that’s how Raoul always remembers November 1963.

It was Darius who told him the news about John F. Kennedy. Sorelli was filming in Scotland and he was deep in his library trying to decide whether or not to also join Labour (he felt they had strayed somewhat from socialist principle but showed some potential and had hope of improving themselves, though he was hesitant over the way they had scapegoated Skeff twenty years earlier and forced him out of the party by implying he was a communist), when Darius found him and told him.

(He supposes the very fact of that links the two events in some way, if only in his own head.)

But Darius told him that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated with a shot to the head on a completely unassuming day.

And Raoul couldn’t help himself, but he thought of Philippe, going out on the water on an unassuming day, and had to get himself a drink.

(Some memories never fade with time, just find their way into other things, and permeate them.)

* * *

It seemed almost distasteful to dance that night. But they had to dance. Had to dance, if only to prove they were alive.

* * *

(Sorelli, years later, told him how she had gotten drunk and gone out with every intention of causing some sort of disturbance, because she too had thought of Philippe, she too could not hear of terrible things happening to other people without thinking of him, and she would have done so, too. Would have gone out and caused trouble to fill every newspaper, but Christine found her, and Christine went with her, and they danced beneath the streetlights in the drizzling rain of Edinburgh at night, and it forced her pieces together, so she would not come apart, not this time.)

(She treasured that night for the rest of her life.)

(Turning horror into beauty. Christine was always very good at it.)

* * *

The years 1964 to 1968 were, in hindsight, mostly unremarkable. Make no mistake there were remarkable things happening. Wars all over the world and people dying and being killed and a whole list of protests that went on and on. But those things did not touch Raoul, could not touch him, and that was his privileged position, to just watch from the sidelines safe from it all though he did wonder, more than once, if he could not be caught in the crossfire, if the Americans and the Soviets finally did blow up at each other.

But the blow up never came, and he found it better not to let himself think about such things, not any more than he needed to.

It was easier, easier on his sanity and easier on his heart, to focus on the things he was good at. Writing and researching. Sending letters to the newspapers. Loving Darius in the darkness and by daylight when they were away from the eyes of others. Going to all of Sorelli’s films and performances and going to dances and after parties with her when she needed him to. He even got good at not caring what the newspapers thought of him, what they wrote of him, when they were photographed together. Let them write as they would. No use in arguing with them, when they would only write it all again anyway, given half a chance.

He made it his policy, to take his happiness where he could find it. And sometimes that meant dancing with Sorelli and sometimes it meant trying to ferret pieces of the future out from Christine though he didn’t really want to know and was mostly doing it to tease her. And sometimes it was just walking on the cliff edge with Darius, and reading the books he was writing, and suggesting edits when he did decide to attempt a career at fiction.

(A career that would have gone better for him, if he had not been such a noted supporter of socialist politics and gotten himself censored on three different occasions.)

He even took up keeping a garden, and grew roses and carnations just for something to do with his hands, and he loved drying the flowers, and watching how their colours would change.

He considered photography, wondered whether or not he could take it up as another practical thing. Most of his photographs would be of Darius, and that would be no bad thing, but while there was more than enough space in the house for a dark room he never had a head for keeping chemical processes straight, so he set the notion aside with mild regret.

Likely he would not have made a good photographer anyway. It would have reminded him too much of Jack, and unsteadied his hands. And though he had learned to be happy in spite of that old grief still living in his bones, he had long-since learned that it was best not to tempt it into becoming anything more. Best not to give it space to grow.

He took Jack’s photographs out instead, and put the best ones up in his study, and Darius smiled at him with a slight sadness in his eyes, and kissed him.

* * *

He wondered, often, in those middle years, what Philippe would have been like if he had lived. Part of it, he will admit, was that he was finding himself turning grey. This sprinkling of silver through his once golden hair. Darius told him it made him look distinguished, but Darius had been slightly grey in a distinguished sort of way as long as they had known each other, so he considered his judgement to be mildly suspect. Sorelli he could trust to be blunt, and she told him it was about time he started getting a little grey. She had been pulling out her greys as they appeared for years.

Still. Seeing his face in the mirror with these new greys, seeing the webbing lines around his eyes that had never been there and the new creases at the corners of his mouth, it made him wonder. What would Philippe have been like?  
Their father was grey when he died. Their father was also only fifty-two and there are not many photos of him from after the war. Philippe never said it, not in so many words, and he has had nobody to ask since, no way of finding out, but he has always suspected the man to have suffered from shell-shock. He was at the Somme, and at Ypres, and who knows where else, and Raoul has heard enough stories, interviewed enough old soldiers, to know what those places were like.

(He asked Christine, once, if she had ever been to the Front, if time had ever cast her back to there, but she shook her head and softly whispered, “no.”)

(“My father turned up in a clearing station once,” she said, “and pretended to be an orderly helping with the wounded, but that’s the closest either of us ever got.”)

But Philippe. Philippe was never through the war, never would have gone to fight in the second war when it came because he abhorred violence, and Raoul could not help wondering, in those years of the mid-sixties, how he would have looked, what he would have been like. He would have been in his sixties, would have lived longer than their father and surely would have been grey and maybe a little stooped, but he could not imagine him without his good humour, could not imagine him without that sparkle in his eye and his hint of a grin. And part of him ached, still, that there was no way he could know, no way he could find out, even as he knew it was futile.

He could only look at himself in the mirror, and wonder.

* * *

The relapse of his illness and joining Labour had together cost Noël his Dáil seat in 1965. It gave him more time to focus on his psychiatry studies, necessitated by the closure of Newcastle sanatorium and his finding himself unemployable as a doctor. (Raoul was oddly relieved that the nature of history meant he himself could never become unemployable, there would always be a field for him to ease his way into.) When he headed for Libya in March 1968 to work on eradicating TB there, with the intention of it being a long-term absence, Raoul was pleased that he’d found something to turn his energy to, even knowing he’d miss him terribly and his bemused smile.

He’s always wondered what, exactly, happened in Libya, that Noël was back within two weeks, the whole plan gone out the window. Noël’s remark of it “not to my taste” was as close as he ever got to the full story, but he was as happy not knowing.

Prying has never been to his taste.

Still, it meant when the election came in 1969 that they were ready for it.

God but he’d missed having a good campaign.

* * *

The Seventies would be Socialist.

That was their platform. “The Seventies will be Socialist.” A Labour majority in the Dáil and they would sort the problems of the world, or at least of the country, and all would be well.

He came very close to standing himself, but decided the scrutiny was unwanted anywhere near his relationship with Darius. So he held himself back, and campaigned hard for Labour and for Noël, and the whole thing ended up a flop and there was no Labour majority and Fianna Fáil were still in power as they had been for the last twelve years, but they did get Noël back into the Dáil and he decided to be content with that.

Content with that, and then Noël had a heart attack and insisted it was nothing to worry about, that it was only small, but Raoul was fucking _frightened_ and Noël’s wife Phyllis even more so, and he never drove so fast in his life as he did that day after Sorelli phoned him at a conference in Cork to tell him the news because Darius was in London meeting a publisher (and Raoul had only finished delivering his paper on the 1848 rebellion and was taking questions when the secretary came to him with the news that he had to get to the phone, and at the remove of almost fifty years he can laugh now at the fright Sorelli must have given the poor boy, and at the way he himself ran from the room without taking a single question).

And it was only afterwards, after the panic had died down, after Noël was out of hospital and definitely alright, that Raoul realized it was a sign they were getting old.

Getting old, and not the men they used to be.

(And in hindsight, it was a sign of how the next decade would be, but that was far from his mind, then.)


	20. 20

The highlight of the early '70s was Sorelli winning her Academy Award. An excellent highlight, as things go.

It would prove to be the highest point for several years to come.

* * *

Not that it was _all_ bad. There were moments shining through, things that were great at the time and continue to be in memory even as they feel a little darker, a little tainted by what was happening around them.

* * *

Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, for playing a stern mother in a romance film. She had been offered a war film as well, the role of a matron in an army hospital and it would have paid more, but she turned it down as she did every war film she was ever offered.

It was a personal thing, a principle, and Raoul loved her all the more for it.

And as it happened, turning down the war film was for the best. It was a complete flop, and though the romance has been almost lost to time, there’s something oddly satisfying in knowing that on a list somewhere of award winners, the name Sorelli Conway is listed, and can never be forgotten.

* * *

Darius had gone with her to America, as moral support. And Raoul spent the night pacing and smoking cigarettes, waiting for the phone call that would come and tell him whether she had won or not. And when it finally came, he laughed and cried to hear her voice on the line, to hear the tears and her smile, and Darius’ laugh. And when the line broke up he found the half-bottle of chartreuse and drank a toast to her name, with only the fire as his witness.

* * *

They went for dinner when she got home. Himself and Darius, and her and Christine. And they chose a small place in Bray, because such was the fuss that to see her out in Dublin would have made it into the papers, and they wanted peace to celebrate.

And then they went dancing, just themselves, in the parlour of the house in Malahide, and it was the best celebration they could have had.

* * *

It was in June that year that Skeff died.

The news of it was such a shock that Darius made sure he was sitting first before telling him.

It was not as if Skeff had been well. He had had a recurring problem with his heart for years, and Raoul had often visited him on his stays in hospital. He was even after spending a few weeks in hospital again, but Raoul was so sure that he was doing better, and then to hear that he was dead—

The weakness was enough to make his head spin.

Skeff.

Skeff who he had known for the best part of thirty years. Skeff who held informal Sunday discussions of literature and politics and society that Raoul went to just as often as he could. Skeff who visited him in Newcastle and when he was confined to his bed before Newcastle and who brought him stories from Trinity to keep him from getting bored, who told him of his own time in the sanatorium in Davos and helped him feel a little more real in those weeks after his diagnosis, before he ever met Jack. _Skeff_. How could he be dead?

It was all he could do to breathe steady, and Darius pressed a glass of brandy into his hand.

(It was Noël who had told Darius, and when Raoul read the next morning the lovely things that Noël said about Skeff in the papers, that was when the tears came.)

* * *

Skeff’s death coloured the whole summer.

He left Dublin with Sorelli, left Darius to his writing, and they went for a long drive around the country, lasting two weeks. They spoke only as much as they needed, shared the driving between them, as if they both knew they needed to run, needed to get away, just for a little while.

And when he got back to Dublin it was to the news that he had been offered a regular column in the _Irish Times_ , if he wanted to take it. And he hesitated, unsure, because it was one thing to write letters or the odd article, and it was quite another to write a regular column, but Darius squeezed his hand and kissed his cheek, and whispered, “something practical for you to do.”

He was always better when he had something practical to do, so he took it.

* * *

Darius made him feel real, gave him form when he felt himself falling adrift. The weight of him at night, pressed close, made it easier to breathe.

He did not dream so much of Philippe, with Darius’ breath soft in his ear.

* * *

In December that year, with Sorelli and Christine, they sat together on the sofa and split a bottle of wine, while they watched the documentary RTÉ had made about Noël. And Raoul couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was this odd heavy feeling in his heart, even surrounded by these people the dearest in the world to him, even seeing that slight smile in Noël’s face on the screen. Beyond words, this strange feeling, and it was not just the shots of Newcastle sanatorium, not just the memory of walking those halls. The sanatorium had been closed for seven years by then, these black-and-white images of it seeming far from real. It was not seeing that that brought it on, more a sense of something, an odd feeling of time.

He caught Christine’s eye, he has always remembered that, ever since, how her eyes seemed especially blue that evening, a little watery, and the smile she gave him held that unnameable thing from deep in his chest.

He might have asked her, maybe, what it was that drew those almost-tears to her eyes, but he never has, not then, and not in all of the years since.

It does not feel like the sort of thing to be spoken of.

* * *

Sorelli spent a good part of the summer of 1971 in hospital.

Gallbladder problems, and it had to come out. And then there was an infection that condemned her to stay there a while longer. He visited her every day, brought her flowers and books and newspapers and scraps of things he’d heard. And she was bored and sore and frustrated at being in hospital for the first time since the TB in her bones, the first time in thirty years, and he knew she was full of memories, knew they were coming sharp and keen, and there was nothing either of them could say, there, about them.

It was the first time he really noticed the grey in her hair.

Darius had had to go to London, to meet with his publisher. And Raoul lay down on their bed, and thought of these new silver threads in Sorelli’s hair, and let the tears come.

(Afterwards, after she left the hospital, he insisted she stay with him until she was well, and she moved into that downstairs room he had lived in, when he was newly diagnosed with his tuberculosis and again after his fall. And there was something oddly comforting, in having her so close by again, in sharing the same space with her, and he found that he didn’t want her to leave.)

* * *

1972 was better.

In hindsight it was a reasonably good year. There was the political drama, of course, of Noël growing apart from the Parliamentary Labour Party and the internal fighting in it that nearly drove Raoul mad. But outside of that he could even say he was happy. His writing was going well, his research fantastic. There were students in several of his classes who showed great promise, and a thesis he was supervising showed every possibility of being a ground-breaking piece of work.

His health was good, twenty years after the tuberculosis. So long as he was careful to get plenty of sleep and eat well he was able to avoid most sicknesses that went around. A bad cold could knock him, but 1972 was a good year on that front. Not like 1971, when he seemed to have a cold every week which was distinctly unpleasant. Sorelli’s health, too, was better than it had been. She was back working, back causing scandal in the newspapers by speaking out against things, and there was an interview series with her in the _Irish Times_ over the course of three weeks that sparked great debate and writing of letters.

That was how he really knew she was back to herself.

She moved back to her own cottage in Wicklow that spring and both he and Darius missed her around the house.

Darius was doing beautifully. He was still lecturing to his students, still analysing Austen and Fanny Burney and anyone else who caught his fancy. Still writing his own novels, and though they were (mostly) censored in Ireland for being too controversial, they were popular in England, and he was over and back to London, talking to publishers and press.

The pride in Raoul’s heart was more than he could put words to, to see Darius doing so well at what he loved. To have people writing letters to him over his books, something that he had created, separate from his research, separate from his classes. Something wholly made of him, and Raoul read each of his books, and treasured them.

They were stories of war, mostly. World War I, and World War II, because Darius had flown a bomber plane, for a short time near the end and knew what he was writing about. And they had romance, and half-implied romance of the homosexual kind which was why they were censored though Darius was not so daft as to write it plain on the page for all to see. There was one set in a sanatorium, because he had had a friend who was a nurse, when he still lived in England. And sometimes Raoul could find a glimmer of himself in the pages, or it felt that way, and each time he opened one and saw the dedication inside, _to RdC_ , it made something in his chest throb.

* * *

There were the Troubles in the North. The bombing, the fighting, the murder. And it angered him, to see that people could still do these things to each other. Catholic and Protestant, Unionist and Republican. All turning against each other, and he could understand why, he knew _why_ but sometimes it felt as if people could never learn, as if all that happened would only ever lead to more of the same. And his sympathies lay with the Catholics, with the Republicans, for all that they had been through, for how they had been stripped of their rights, but the violence of it, the _violence_ , people dead in the street, _children_ —

How could he ever find that anything but abhorrent?

And it seemed at once so far away, and closer than he could ever dream of.

* * *

It was December.

December when Darius got the letter that called him to England. A professorship in Cambridge, if he wanted it.

And Raoul realised then that he must have applied for it, and never told him.

That was their first fight.

* * *

They made it up again. Made it up, and when Raoul turned fifty ( _fifty_ , him, a whole half decade old) in January, there was a party and it almost seemed as if they could pretend the offer had never happened.

But it hung over every day.

Darius knew, knew how terrified Raoul was of the water, knew flying frightened him to the bone, knew he had nightmares of these things and more. And still he had applied for it, still—

He wondered when it was that Darius had fallen out of love with him. Wondered if it was something that he had done, if he had not been enough, if he should have done _more,_ could have done more.

But a professorship in Cambridge, and him unable to go.

* * *

He tried not to let it consume him, tried to focus on other things, think about other things. The impending election, Noël refusing to sign the pledge that he would abide by any and all decisions of the Labour Party, including going into a disastrous coalition, should he be re-elected, and the party refusing to let him stand. The wrangling over it, and Raoul agreed with Noël, and Sorelli did, and even with his head consumed by Darius, Raoul knew were he in that position he would refuse to sign too.

It’s all well and good following the party line, but for some things a man in the Dáil needs a free vote, and with gunrunning north and south, how could anyone be expected to give up that vote?

And still Noël was the lone voice of dissent in the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the party refused to let him stand because he refused to sign the pledge.

“Might not be such a bad thing,” and Noël had that slight smile. “I’ll spend more time with Phyllis.”

* * *

18 February 1973.

The day it all came down.

He and Darius were hardly speaking to each other by then. Every day more things disappeared, packed up to be shipped, as if all they had ever been was reduced to these bags, these boxes. As if it could ever be reduced to pieces of luggage. Thirteen years together, come to this.

And on that last day, as these things were loaded to be brought to the boat, they stood facing each other, each hardly daring to breathe, and it came to Raoul that it was like the first time they had kissed, the way they could only look into each other’s eyes, only this time they were not drunk and dancing, this time it was an ending, and he might have laughed there in the hallway of his own house if he had thought he would be able to stop, thought he would not fall to weeping.

So he didn’t laugh. And he did not feel like tears, did not feel much of anything, and Darius’ arm twitched as if he was going to offer him his hand and then thought better of it, and neither of them could find words to say. Not _I’m sorry_ , not _I hope you’ll be happy_ , not _you’ll write?_ even knowing they wouldn’t, couldn’t, not a word that could fit, until finally one found its way to Raoul’s tongue.

“Why?”

And Darius swallowed, and shook his head. “It just felt like time.”

And without another word, he was gone.


	21. 21

For all the years since, for all that happened, for how it ended, there is a part of him that loves Darius still. That love for him lives deep in his bones, remembers only the kisses and touches, the dancing, the feel of another body in the darkness. It is deep inside of him, cradled safe, and he is not sure he would have it any other way.

* * *

Darius left, and he wandered through the house like a ghost. As if he could feel his voice through the shadows, hear him through the lancing rays of sunlight breaking through the windows. He did not cry, he did not rage, he just walked.

Walked, as if he were a ghost himself.

And then he drank.

* * *

Whiskey. A bottle he had been keeping for some special occasion, for some purpose and time unknown.

His fingers sought the bottle, and he did not bother with a glass.

* * *

His memories of the car accident are a jumbled mess, and ones he prefers not to dwell on, prefers not to try and untangle. It was the whiskey, and the blood loss, and the bang to his head. The aching grief inside and the odd numbness in his hands.

He ought not to have been driving. That much he knew in a subconscious sort of way at the time. The weather was bad, the evening dark, the rain pounding down. But he didn’t care, couldn’t let himself care, not then.

Darius was gone.

Darius had left him.

That simple fact was all he knew. That, and that he needed to move, needed to run, needed to get away and be somewhere else.

He got in the car without any notion of where to go, and drove.

* * *

Screech of brakes and flash of light and the shooting pain in his head.

Red and blue, red and blue and whining sirens.

An indistinct face and a voice asking questions. The date? 18 February 1973. The Taoiseach? Lynch still. The President? DeV the bastard.

And, for a long time, a blur of pain, and darkness creeping at the edges of his thoughts.

* * *

_“What are you reading?”_

_Jack has been quiet all day, reading a leather-bound book of poetry, sometimes looking up to stare out the window and sigh, teeth worrying at his lip. Raoul isn’t sure he’s really reading at all. He hasn’t seen him turn any page._

_“Yeats.”_

_Reasonable enough. “Anything in particular?”_

_Another one of those sighs, enough that Raoul decides conversation is unlikely to get anywhere so he settles back against his pillows and closes his eyes. Sorelli will be due in a little while, and she likes to see he’s been resting._

_“Do you think it was true?” And Jack’s voice is quiet, a whisper, or almost._

_“Think what was true?”_

_A breath, and then, “Casement. Do you think the diaries were forged? Or might he really have been one of us?”_

One of us.

One of us.

_“A homosexual.” The word feels oddly heavy on his tongue, though he has thought it many times in these weeks since he and Jack first kissed. “I don’t know. I haven’t studied him enough. And the books all say—”_

_“The books can’t countenance that it might have been true.”_

* * *

It was the oddest of memories, almost a dream, that lingered on his mind as he came back to himself. Jack’s voice soft, as if he were whispering in his ear still, and that leather-bound book.

But it was Sorelli he opened his eyes to. Sorelli, and it took him a moment, groping through his thoughts, to see the paleness of her face, to realize that no, no of course it would not be Jack waiting at his side.

Something wrong with his right eye that he couldn’t open it fully, the vision blurred. An aching in his cheek, in his head, and some instinctual thing warned him not to move.

She squeezed his fingers, and he could see the blood on her lip, from where she had bitten it raw.

“You were in an accident,” she whispered, her voice hoarse. “But you’re going to be alright now, I promise.” And her lips were soft as she kissed his fingers. “I couldn’t find Darius to tell him.”

Darius.

_Darius._

His breath hitched, the memory of the door closing driving the breath from his lungs.

Darius.

And tears welled in his eyes so that Sorelli blurred and he swallowed, her fingers tightening around his. And when he shaped the words, his voice was a croak. “Gone.”

_Darius is gone._

* * *

She stayed with him until he lost consciousness again. Stayed with him, and brushed the tears from his cheeks, and kissed his forehead, and lay her head down next to his, so that their faces were almost touching, and he knew she would have hugged him if she could, if she had not been afraid of hurting him, would have held him and given him someone to lean into, but she had to settle for twining her fingers tight with his, and whispering in his ear, and it was her voice that made it easier to him to let go, to give himself the rest that he needed.

It was only afterwards he learned he had had his spleen removed, to stop it bleeding, and an operation on his left lung, for more bleeding, and when he laughed despite the pain it was almost hysterical.

To survive TB, to survive a haemorrhaging lung, and then to almost choke on his own blood because of a _car accident._ The most _ridiculous_ fucking thing he had ever heard _._

There is still a small scar over his left eye, from the gash that was stitched closed, but he didn’t laugh when it reminded him of the stitches over Philippe’s eye, when he died.

He was lucky, lucky to have come through as well as he did, lucky to not be dead himself after his foolishness.

It didn’t feel very much like luck at all. Not with Darius gone.

* * *

_“To this most gallant gentleman,” Jack’s voice a murmur in his ear, “that is in quicklime laid.”_

_“I can think of a different gallant gentleman,” and it was all he could do to keep the smile from his voice, “whom I should very much like to get to know further.”_

_And Jack flashed him a grin, his eyes dancing, before he kissed him._

* * *

Transfusions, painkillers, antibiotics. The knowledge that the best he had ever had was lost to him…

It weighed him down, and sleeping was easier than waking.

* * *

For two days he couldn’t bring himself to speak. Not to Sorelli, not to Christine, not to the doctors when they asked him questions. He was sure that if he opened his mouth he would start screaming and not be able to stop.

Noël came to see him, on the third day, and made that face, the one that said, _I intend to sit here until you say something and I don’t care how long it takes._

(Raoul suspected he had learned it from Sorelli, but couldn’t confirm.)

And Raoul couldn’t explain it but he wanted to tell him, wanted to tell _someone_ what had happened, how he had loved Darius and how it felt like he was the other part of his soul but clearly Darius didn’t feel the same way because now he’s gone and who’s to say that there wasn’t someone else? Someone else in Cambridge who caught Darius’ heart the way Darius had caught his heart, and the very thought of it made him shiver, made sweat break out cold on his skin.

Could Darius have had somebody else? Would he have?

And Noël must have seen something in his face, because he frowned, and tapped his fingers lightly on the back of his hand, the gentlest tapping, enough to remind Raoul to breathe, enough to bring him back to himself.

“If there’s anything you want to tell me—”

“Darius…” And Raoul’s voice was hardly more than a whisper, the tears threatening to well in his eyes and he blinked against them and turned his head to Noël fully. “Darius is—”

“You mean that he’s your lover?”

And it sounded so blunt, so _plain_ , put like that, and how could Noël know? Raoul never told him, never told anyone, except Sorelli and Christine, let everyone else think Darius was just staying with him to save money and because they were friends. He never told anyone about him, about them. How could he? It was illegal, it was indecent, it was a sin and an affront to all that was good and right in the world. How could he just _tell_ people?

“Raoul,” and Noël’s voice was very low, those dark eyes concerned and careful, “I’ve known you’re a homosexual since 1952.” And then a slight smile. “I don’t know what Clongowes was like, but I imagine it wasn’t too different from Beaumont.”

Clongowes and the boys in the dormitories creeping into each other’s beds. _Stress relief_. 1952.

1952.

So Noël knew about—

“Jack.” The name was just as familiar, the shape of it just as right, on Raoul’s tongue as it ever was.

“Since Jack.” And Noël patted the back of his hand. “I could not be certain, but then after you had your haemorrhage, you kept asking for him.” It was all Raoul could do to keep breathing, slow breaths, to fight the aching tightening in his throat, the pain in his chest from the surgery and that old grief still in his heart. “For him and your brother both. And then I was certain.” A slight smile twitching the corner of his lips. “It was what Sorelli didn’t say.”

And Raoul felt another great rush of love towards Sorelli, his dearest, oldest friend, protecting his secrets and always there for him, always ready to rush to his side.

He swallowed and found his voice. “Was.”

Noël squinted, just slightly, that contemplative squint that Raoul went to a good deal of trouble to learn. “Was?”

“Darius _was_ my lover.” So strange, to give the words voice, to let them out into the air.

The barest flicker of something in Noël’s face and then, “ah.” A beat, “explains a good lot.” Raoul might have asked him what it explained, but he thought it obvious that maybe it explained why he got drunk and crashed his car and landed himself in hospital, until Noël sat back in his chair and said, “Sorelli swore she’d hit him if she ever saw him again.”

And in spite of everything, Raoul laughed.

(It was crying more than laughing, and it turned to weeping, but he felt lighter, afterwards, for it.)

* * *

“Is there anything you want me to bring you? Any books?” Noël getting ready to leave, and Raoul considered.

Scott and Tennyson were things that Darius read. And Austen and Burney.

The memory of Jack’s voice, soft in his ear.

_…most gallant gentleman…in quicklime laid…_

“Collected Yeats. With the Casement poems.”

* * *

Christine came to see him that night. Christine, stealing into his hospital room like a ghost. Her face pale, and she looked so young, younger than he had grown used to seeing her, her face pale in the low light.

She sat down on the edge of his bed, and he winced as the movement pulled on the new stitches in his stomach, and leaned into her.

Christine. Always coming when he needed her, called back through time to his side.

If he were not so tired, he might have asked her about it. But he was so very tired, and the grief of missing Darius had settled back into his heart, so instead he asked her the same thing he always did.

“When are you coming from?”

“March 2020.” Her voice was soft in the darkness. “There’s a pandemic.”

A pandemic? That couldn’t be good. Frightening, really, to think of her living through such a thing, but this bit of her future he could give her, for once. Not often, that he could make promises to her. “You’ll come through it alright. I’ve known you older.”

Her fingers brushed his forehead, careful with his new gash, that maybe she had seen as a scar. “I’ve known you older too.”

Simple things, little words, these pieces they could give each other.

* * *

(She was flicking through the book of Yeats Noël had returned with, and it was all he could do to stay awake, for her sake, and when she saw that the tiredness was pulling at him, she put the book aside and kissed his forehead. “Sleep,” she whispered, “and I’ll sing you a song that doesn’t exist yet.” She always had the most wonderful voice, and she never sang enough, and when his eyes drifted closed she kissed his fingers and her voice was soft, wrapping around him. “Handsome I am, a red-blooded man…” And he sighed, and that sweet singing bore him into gentle dreams.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some small notes:  
> The Taoiseach is our version of a Prime Minister, and in February 1973 -- before the election at the end of the month -- was still Jack Lynch.  
> DeV is Eamon de Valera, who, after a lengthy period of time as Taoiseach, was elected President in 1959 and served two terms before retiring in May 1973 at the age of 90.  
> The song Christine sings at the end of this chapter is 'The Black Diary Waltz' by The Mariannes, which is *gorgeous* and on both YouTube and Spotify.  
> The poem quoted in this chapter is 'Roger Casement' by W.B. Yeats. Casement was an Irish nationalist (and considered the father of 20th century human rights investigations for his work investigating the exploitation of the Congolese by the Belgians for the sake of the rubber trade, and similar subsequent work investigating the abuse of Peruvian natives for the rubber trade), and was stripped of his knighthood in 1916 after attempting to smuggle German guns into Ireland prior to the 1916 Easter Rising. He was captured, tried, and hanged for high treason on 3 August 1916, then buried in quicklime in an unmarked grave on the grounds of Pentonville Prison. Prior to his hanging a number of photographed diary extracts were circulated in an attempt to destroy public support for him -- these diary extracts revealed him as a homosexual. However, the provenance of these "black diaries" is debated, with a school of thought insisting that they were forgeries in order to smear his character. There is a great deal of evidence for both sides of the debate, and it is likely that the diaries are authentic or authentic up to a point. Casement is considered by many to be a queer Irish icon. His remains were repatriated in 1965 and buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.  
> Yeats believed the diaries a forgery, and wrote this poem to voice that opinion. A second poem of his, 'The Ghost of Roger Casement' is anti-British imperialism in general and largely uses Casement as a framing device.


	22. 22

Mostly, when he remembers those weeks in hospital, he remembers the hollowness in his chest, how every night Darius came to haunt him in his dreams, and how he wondered, in the long periods when he was alone, what it was that had gone wrong between them, or if there was anything he could have done to change it.

Selfish, maybe, to want to keep Darius in his life when Darius so clearly did not want to be kept, but he loved him. He loved him. What was so terrible in having loved him?

And when he whispered that to Sorelli, on one of her visits, she stroked back her hair, and squeezed his fingers, and couldn’t find an answer for him.

* * *

Though he was so often alone, in those weeks, he did not want for visitors. He had Sorelli, every day, and she made it known to him that when he was well again he would not be going home to his own house but coming to stay with her for a little while, so she could keep an eye on him.

He thought it best not to argue with her. And in truth, he did not really want to go back to his own house in Malahide. It was too full of Darius, too full of memories, too full of the fact that he had been happy, had been so very happy, and that was over now. So he agreed without protest, and it was only afterwards that he realised his lack of protest probably worried her.

* * *

(Christine, one night, sitting at his side, her face pale in the dim light, and he had to ask, or else it would keep twisting in his head. “You knew, didn’t you, that he’d leave?” Not a question, not truly. Of course she had known. She always knew everything. And she swallowed, and brushed her thumb over his fingers, and her voice was very low. “I hoped, maybe, you would be happier not knowing.”)

* * *

Noël came to see him, as often as he could, but he was busy with running in the Seanad elections, had secured enough nominations, and Raoul regretted that he didn’t have the energy to campaign for him this time, and likely wouldn’t for a while after he was released. He was just so _tired_ , and the antibiotics were making him more so, and the thought of anything that required much in the way of thinking made him want to close his eyes and sleep until the world stopped looking for him.

Noël patted his hand, and told him just to worry about himself.

* * *

Several of his students came to visit, the ones he was helping with their PhDs, and he made arrangements for someone else to look after them, just until he had his head in order again.

They didn’t know, of course, that Darius had broken his heart, but they told him they looked forward to him being well again.

(It was afterwards that he let himself cry.)

* * *

He read the Yeats book three times, those words _this most gallant gentleman_ ones that he heard echoed in Jack’s voice in his head every time he saw them, and Sorelli brought him Markievicz, and Eva Gore-Booth. Light things, that he wouldn’t have to focus too much on.

“Any requests for when you’re out?”

He thought of Jack, and that question of if Casement had been like them, and nodded.

“I could be wrong, so check the reference, but didn’t Singleton-Gates publish Casement’s black diaries?”

* * *

_It just felt like time._

Time.

Time.

Darius’ words, not his. _It just felt like time._

Time to end it, everything they were and everything they had been.

Always him left to survive, always him left to carry on. What is it about time that it seems to dictate that it should always be him?

(Time that casts Christine back, and if it had not been for time and its vagaries then he would never have known her and his life would be so much the lesser for it, the lesser for not having her and her smile and her soft way of admonishing him and reminding him that there is more than this, more than how he feels and what’s in his bones. And maybe it’s selfish of him to have wanted Darius to stay, but if it was time that dictated that Darius had to leave, how could he ever have done anything about that?)

* * *

Sometimes, he has really cursed Philippe for having died. Not that he could have known, not that he could have prevented it. But if Philippe had not gone out on the water that day—

And as he lay in hospital, after Darius, he ached just to see his brother, just to ask him if he had been happy.

* * *

The thirty-fourth anniversary of the day that Philippe was murdered, when he was released from the hospital. And all he wanted was to get to Sorelli’s house and sleep and not have to think, but he would not forgive himself if he did not visit Philippe.

A damp, drizzly day, and Sorelli looked like she was going to refuse to take him to Glasnevin, that firmness in her jaw, until she nodded, and swallowed.

“I’ll stop first for flowers.”

(They picked their way through the graveyard, and when they got to the stone carrying Philippe’s name, his knees felt like they would buckle, the old grief hitting him, changed, new and old at once and Darius in his memory, and as he drew in a shaking breath, Sorelli wrapped her arm around him, and held him, and they stood there like that, silent, for a long time.)

* * *

Christine came, that night.

He was already settled into the bed that would be his for as long as he wanted it to be, and he heard her in the kitchen, the soft murmur of her voice with Sorelli’s. Warmth spread through his chest, to think of them both out there, so happy with each other, so quiet, and he closed his eyes, and decided it would be a good time to try to sleep, while that warm feeling was still deep within him.

The door creaked open, and his eyelids fluttered, and opened, and he saw Christine slip in, carrying two mugs of tea.

She set one down for him, on the bedside locker, and settled on the edge of the bed. He shifted, slowly, carefully not to jar the still-healing wound from where they’d taken out his spleen, and managed to sit up, and she fixed a pillow behind his back, and pressed the tea into his hand.

She looked as if she might ask him something, but there was a question that had been rattling around in his head for weeks, and if he didn’t ask it now, then he never might.

“Do you love someone in your own time?”

The words were low, his voice just a little gravelly, and he cleared his throat, and sipped his tea, and watched her. Something flickered across her face, something unreadable, but then she smiled and nodded.

“Does Sorelli know?”

Christine sipped her own tea, and nodded. “She does, and she’s very happy for us.”  
“And does she—does this other person—”

“Erik.” She smiled to say the name, and his throat tightened to see it, but he managed to smile back at her.

“Does Erik know about Sorelli?”

She nodded again, and her voice was softer than he had ever heard it. “He does, and he’s happy. Happy that I’m not alone, when I come back here.”

 _I’m happy too,_ Raoul thinks, _that you’re not alone when you go to your own time_. But he didn’t say that. He just leaned back against his pillow, and swallowed. “Tell me about him, will you?”

A smile spread across her face, and she nodded, and told him.


	23. 23

He dreams, more and more, of Philippe.

Strange, that it should be in the last weeks of his life, after seventy-eight years of missing him, that he should feel so close to his brother.

But Philippe is there every night, when he sleeps. The shadow of him walking, his footsteps on the stairs. His hands stark-white in the light cast by the fire, that ring on his small finger. His tall frame as he stands looking at the bookshelf. His laugh, so warm, so _safe._ Philippe. As if Raoul could open his eyes, and he would be right there, sitting beside him.

Sometimes Sorelli is there too. Her face stern as she leans across the table, or sipping tea by the window, or sitting in her chair, looking out at the garden, her hair pinned back. Both of them coming to him, as he remembers them best.

He has made peace with the fact that he has lived to be so much older than them. The odd grief of it died that summer of 1973, when he had nothing to do but rest, but sit, and read, and think. And he spent most of it with Sorelli, looking out at her garden, and she always insisted on draping a blanket over him so he wouldn’t get cold, even when his injuries had healed, even when he could very well have gone back home. But he hadn’t wanted to be alone, hadn’t wanted to sit in that great big house and hear nothing but the echo of his own breathing, so he stayed, and they talked. Talked about the things neither of them had ever really spoken of to each other before, about Philippe, and about Christine, too. And about her Erik, because once Raoul knew about him then Sorelli wanted to talk about him, just a little. The things she had been holding inside too long, about the relief that Christine would not be alone.

Those long evenings, the two of them sitting looking out the window, sipping wine, or tea. And it was her who mentioned first, how odd it was to be so much older than Philippe had been, and how she wondered, sometimes, what he would have been like, if he had lived. If he could have lived. That she mentioned it at all gave him room for the words to come, and when he said how wrong it felt, so much of the time, that he should be there when Philippe wasn’t, that he should be the one to have lived, she squeezed his fingers, and sighed.

“If someone told me right now,” she whispered, “that he could come back, but it would mean losing you, then I wouldn’t change a thing.” And she swallowed. “And he wouldn’t either.”

* * *

“I have never been so frightened, as that night in Newcastle with Noël, when we thought you would die.” A tear slipped down her cheek, and his breath caught in his throat.

* * *

His injuries healed, his heart healed. And there would always be a little crack in it, left by Darius, but he could breathe again.

August came, time to get ready for the new semester, and he went home. And the big house did not feel so very big and terrible, when Christine was there waiting for him, and she had a fire in the grate.

“I don’t think I’ll be staying long,” she whispered, and hugged him.

* * *

Christine comes to him often. Both the Christine of this time, and other Christines, future Christines come back to see him from a time without him.

It is oddly touching, that he should continue to mean so much to her through her future, when these future versions are part of his past, ones he met in years and decades gone by, with Sorelli. But still she comes back to see him to a time when there is no Sorelli, and he finds it best if he doesn’t think about it too much because it gives him a headache to consider time and the shape of it and the things it does. Enough to know that even in the far-off future that will never see him, that Christine is thinking of him, still.

He never asks her about her future. It is a silent agreement that she can tell him if she wants, but he doesn’t want to have to know things, doesn’t want her to have to talk about things if she doesn’t want to. And he never asks about Erik, though he knows that for at least some of these future Christines that Erik is still a part of her life.

It just doesn’t feel right, knowing pieces of the future of this boy who is the closest he has ever had to a son, when Erik himself cannot know them. It strikes him as deceitful.

(Though he will confess that when Erik had his car accident, it was a relief knowing that he would be all right, that he would have to be all right, because an older version of Christine had mentioned him as doing well in her time.)

Erik visits him every day, but his visits never collide with that of the older Christines, and Raoul wonders if that’s something that time is responsible for as well, or merely a coincidence.

* * *

1974 was an unremarkable year, but after 1973 _unremarkable_ was quite enough to be getting on with.

Mostly he read, when he wasn’t working. And mostly it was about Casement, because that question of Jack’s, remembered after his accident, of if Casement had been like them, wouldn’t go away. And he came to the conclusion that Casement probably had been a homosexual too, and Jack would have liked that, but he didn’t want to be certain when he hadn’t seen the actual diaries himself, only the printed copy of them, and knowing what it is to deal in documents and transcription he wouldn’t be surprised if there were mistakes in the typing. But the diaries were in London, and he couldn’t go and see them because that would mean either a boat or a plane,

Sorelli solved the problem for him, when he finally told her that winter, on the cusp of 1975. “I’ll look at them,” she said. “Tell them that I’m writing a book, and photograph some pages if they’ll let me. Take plenty of notes anyway.” He gaped at her, and she grinned. “If you think I don’t know your research methods by now…”

* * *

And it worked. She took a trip first to the NLI, several trips, and learned Casement’s handwriting, and then she went to London. They didn’t want her to photograph the pages, but she could confirm the writing in the phonecall she made to Raoul after that first day, and he felt a little weak to hear her say, _yes, it’s his_. And she took plenty of notes, and brought them home to him in the spring of 1975, and he trembled to see them, and how she had copied some of the writing, how she had transcribed some of the lines.

(The May 1910 entries, about the weekend in Warrenpoint with Millar of surname-unknown, was enough to leave his throat dry.)

( _28 May 1910. Left for Warrenpoint with Millar…Not a word said till – “Wait – I’ll untie it” and then “Grand”…and so deep mutual longing… “Grand”._ )

So that was his project of 1975 and ’76. And a little of ‘77. Reading all of the published books on Casement, the documents in the NLI, Sorelli’s transcriptions. She was in London several more times, in those two years and a bit, for plays and for films, and she took more trips to the archives to see them for him, and every time he sent her with a list of queries that he wanted answers to.

The book, when it was written, was his masterpiece.

 _It is my considered opinion that the person who wrote the so-called_ Black Diaries _was a homosexual_ , he wrote. _It is also my considered opinion that the diaries were not forged, and were written by Sir Roger Casement_.

The book’s publication was limited, his conclusion considered too scandalous, which was why he kept Sorelli’s name out of it, that she would not be made suspect by association. But its publication was sufficiently widespread that he saw his name creep into journals and conference papers on the question of Casement’s authorship, and when, years later, many years later (nineteen years later in 1996) there was another book being prepared on the 1910 diary, his own book was published again, and this time he added Sorelli’s name to it.

The world had turned. Homosexuality was no longer a criminal offense. And his best friend was dead, but the world deserved to know her contribution to the field of history. How she did not have to do it, but she did it anyway.

He only wished he could have made it known in her lifetime.

* * *

(He dedicated it, both editions, the 1977 and the 1996, _to the memory of JS_ , because if it had not been for Jack, and the memory of him, he never would have started the research in the first place.)

* * *

It was 6 July 1977 when he ran into Harry.

 _Harry_.

Twenty years since he had seen him. Twenty years, and a little more, since that last day in early February, the misting drizzle outside, when they kissed for the last time and parted.

(Were all his relationships doomed to break up in early February? Harry, and then Darius…)

He was walking in the Phoenix Park, mentally composing an article he wanted to write about Noël, and about how great it felt getting him back into the Dáil as an Independent Labour candidate after his years half in the political wilderness in the Seanad. And he was so busy, deep in his head, in his thoughts, that he didn’t see the familiar face, until he heard someone call his name.

“Raoul!”

And he looked up, and it took him a minute he will admit, to place where he knew that face, the hair more grey than the sandy blond he remembered, but it was _Harry_.

_Harry._

In spite of himself, he grinned.

* * *

He never bore any ill will towards Harry. Never bore any towards Darius either, even with the way things ended. But with Harry it had simply been a drifting apart, and nothing either of them could have done would have stopped it.

To see him again was as if the sun had suddenly peeked out from behind the clouds on the dullest of days.

* * *

They went to a pub. And while Harry had Guinness, Raoul contented himself with a glass of wine. And they talked, mostly, of what they were doing now.

Harry was still married, and his wife was called Sheila, and they were happy and had a son (in university in Belfast) and a daughter (still in school), and Raoul was happy for them.

“You’re still causing trouble in the papers,” Harry remarked, and Raoul grinned.

“Doing my best.” And it felt as if twenty years had been taken off him.

They did not mention Jack. And Harry didn’t ask him about his own relationship prospects, too discreet for that, knowing too well the way of things, but those would be for future conversations.

They parted with a hug, and Harry told him that if he was ever in Belfast, to look him up.

They both knew they could never go back to the way things were. And neither of them wanted to, but if they could be friends, that would be enough.

* * *

The noise Sorelli made when she heard he’d run into Harry made him snort, and she insisted on making him tea, so he could tell her all about it.

“There’s so little other excitement at my time of life,” she said with a perfectly straight face, and he almost choked.

“At your time of life? As if you weren’t up at all hours last night with Christine.” And he knew she had been because they were both staying with him and he could hear the giggling down the hall.

Her eyes sparkled, and it was all he could do not to snort again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quoted extract for 28 May 1910 is a genuine abbreviated entry from Roger Casement's 1910 black diary, as published in the 2002 collection of his black diaries edited by Jeffrey Dudgeon. Also included in Peter Singleton-Gates' published copy of some of the diaries from 1959.


	24. 24

The first snowdrops are just poking their way up now. The first snowdrops of his last spring, and he regrets only that it is too cold for him to go out into the garden himself and see them, too cold to sit out there for a little while, and watch the birds gathering twigs for their nests, to pick some of those delicate little flowers and press them for Christine, or set them in a vase, just for a few days. Hopefully he should see the early daffodils, though it might be a bit much to hope for the greater periwinkles at the end of the garden. That flush of purple in the green always reminds him just a little of Mary Black’s song about leaving Néidín. It was one of Sorelli’s favourites.

Never can he hear it, and not think of her.

Has he told Christine that? This young Christine? Or is it something she will have to find out for herself?

So many things he could say, so many things to try to put words around, and is it better that she find them out in time? Or should he give her as many little pieces as he can?

He knows the date of his death, knows how it will happen, has known it for so long now, more than twenty years. (Twenty-four years, very nearly. Twenty-four years of knowing the date of his own death, but he has managed well, he thinks, in living as if he did not know.) He would bundle himself up well and go out into the garden, but his bones ache and he has no desire to hasten his last illness, has no desire to deprive himself of even a moment of wellness.

So he behaves, and watches the birds and the flowers out through the windows, and thinks that it will not be so very long, now, until the end.

Just a few weeks.

It’s peaceful, really, not having to worry about things, to know the few things of the future that he needs to know. That Christine will be well, and happy. That she will still love Erik and he will still love her and they’ll be happy together. That Anea will keep an eye on them both, as she has done for this young Christine (so young, really, when he thinks about it, compared to some of the Christines he has known) all of her life.

As she does for him, when she drops in on him, every morning and evening, to bring him the paper and check if he needs anything and she usually insists on cooking for him and fussing over him and he lets her because she wants to do it, and Sorelli would be pleased to know that there’s still someone to make a fuss of him in her absence.

She always did worry.

Christine comes too, of course, when she can, and if she misses a day here or there he doesn’t mind because she’s a busy young woman even without getting tossed through time, and he has no right to monopolise her time, especially not when he has known her for so many years, almost all of his life, really, certainly the vast majority of it. When she is not in this time, it is just as likely that she’s with him and Sorelli, deep in the past.

If his younger self, that younger self that first met her properly all the way back in 1945, was to know that she would still be in his life now, more than seventy years later, he would be dumbfounded.

Raoul almost wishes he could tell him, just to see the surprise on his own younger self’s face.

No way he can, of course, but it’s amusing to think about.

He told it to Erik when he came yesterday and Erik snorted and laughed. He was right after bringing in a couple of those snowdrops, and had set them in water beside the window, their drooping white heads framed against the glass, and Raoul smiled to himself to see this young man, who does seem so much a boy at times, laughing. It’s good to make him laugh. He should laugh more often, especially now that his shoulder has healed after his accident.

“Are you composing at the minute?” he asked, and something flickered in Erik’s face, before he nodded.

“It’s a surprise,” he said, but there was mischief in his eyes, and Raoul decided, as he has done at some point every day since he first met him, that Christine made an excellent choice in loving this man.

* * *

After that day that he met Harry in the Phoenix Park and they went for drinks, they took up writing. The only other regular correspondent he had ever had was Sorelli when he was in school, though they did write letters every time she was away filming something, and of course he had written Darius on a regular basis whenever he was in England, but he couldn’t count that somehow. It was different when they were involved with each other, and then they weren’t involved and there were no letters and he preferred to not have to remember that. But taking Harry on as a regular correspondent when he had gone back to Belfast was a nice way to occupy himself, and there was always something interesting in the letters he received, some new observation, some witticism.

It was only sometimes they wrote of Jack, and they did not often refer to the time that they had been together, and both of those things were fine. As if, after everything, they had learned to be friends on their own merits, without the influence of anything else.

It was nice just to have him as a friend. He had not realised how much he’d missed Darius for that alone.

* * *

He still has all of those old letters, from Sorelli, from Harry, even from Darius, and odd other ones from different people at different times, tucked away safe with the ones from Philippe.

It has always seemed wrong, somehow, to ever let anything happen to them.

* * *

Of course, he was far from being idle in those years. Noël and Sorelli both got involved with the new Socialist Labour Party, and that drew Raoul into it, gave him a focus alongside his research. Sorelli even considered standing for election, and might have too and would certainly have gotten in, but she would have had to curtail her acting and directing, and she never liked curtailing those unless she had to, never did unless he, Raoul, needed her. They decided, together, that it would be better for her to use her platform as an actress to speak out against things. She could draw more attention to the things that needed attention, and no one could say that she only got elected because of who she was.

* * *

They rang in 1978 together, he and Sorelli, and Christine was not there so when midnight came they kissed each other’s cheeks, and toasted a glass of champagne to the year gone out, and danced, slowly, together, around the sitting room of her little cottage.

He couldn’t think of a nicer way to ring in a new year.

* * *

He turned fifty-five a few days later and Christine had popped into their time by then, and when she heard the date she hugged him and insisted they all go out for dinner. The dancing came after, and the three of them drank so much in the pub they found themselves in that they got a taxi home and fell into the same bed together and slept.

When the morning came, his head pounding and the room spinning, he extracted himself from between his two favourite ladies, and swore never to drink so much again.

* * *

He was not looking for love. He decided, after Darius, that he had tasted enough of it. Anyway, he was too _old_ to look for anyone else. Who in their right mind would take an interest in him? A man in his fifties, hair turning grey, these wrinkles coming into his face, not to mention his scars. What man would want him? No, he decided. Best not to even consider it. He had Sorelli, and he had his friendship with Noël, and Christine every time she came, and he had his research and his students and his articles. He didn’t need any more that.

Besides, homosexual acts were still a criminal offense, and it was best to keep himself out of trouble.

It was too much trouble to even think about looking.

Then he met David, and David was twenty years younger, a new professor of history, and as his heart thudded in his chest he knew he had just found trouble.

* * *

He was hardly involved with David long enough, really, to miss him when he was gone. Three months in late 1978, and then David went off to Edinburgh. Three months of kisses, and glances, and soft touches, and all it came to, in the end, were a couple of letters over and back across the sea, and that was it.

It was almost a relief, really, to be his own man again, and he knew, then, that he would never get involved with anyone else.

He thinks now, looking back, that it was as well, really. True it might be nice to still know romance in his old age, but he has enough in his life as it is. Anything more might only tire him.

* * *

Forty years since Philippe’s death and it seemed an utterly ridiculous span of time. That his brother, his dear older brother, could be dead _forty years_?

How could it be that long?

How could it be _allowed_ to be that long?

(He and Sorelli went together to the grave, like they did every year, even the year he was sick with TB, and brought flowers and lay them down, and as he squeezed her hand he knew she was wondering the same thing. How could it be that long, when it seemed like only yesterday he had last walked through the door?)

* * *

1979 and they knew things were getting shaky in the government, had suspected it for a while, but when, at the end of the year, Charles Haughey challenged Jack Lynch for the leadership of Fianna Fáil and thus of the government, it still came as a bit of a surprise. That Haughey succeeded was less surprising, but what Raoul remembers best is sitting in the visitors’ gallery of the Dáil with Sorelli and Christine, when Noël made his scathing speech against Haughey.

_…my awful nightmare is that this man is a dreadful cross between Richard Milhous Nixon and Dr Salazar…_

And as the shiver went down Raoul’s spine, he looked to Christine and found her gazing rapt upon the proceedings beneath her, and wondered how much of this was still spoken of in her time, and how momentous of an occasion did it really prove to be.

(He’s had his answer in all the decades since, in the elections, the scandals, the tribunals, the documentaries, and that short clip of Noël, outside the Dáil after that speech, the touch of grey in his hair and that squint in his eye, and they play it in them all for the power of its quiet gravitas, _my fear of Mister Haughey is his obsessional preoccupation with being the leader…_ )

* * *

He and Sorelli, lying by the fire, the last night of 1979. And as they toasted themselves, toasted the decade just gone out, the good and the bad of it, they wondered what the next years would bring.

(Recession, Noël’s retirement from politics, Sorelli’s stepping back from acting to make documentaries, the movement, small but sure, to decriminalise homosexuality, and Raoul still writing, still stirring up trouble in the newspapers, when he needed to.

* * *

First there was Belfast with Harry, and when Harry moved to kiss him, Raoul drew back and shook his head. “We can’t do that again,” he whispered. “Things are too different for the both of us.”

(“I’ll not come between you and your family,” he added, and Harry nodded, and swallowed. “I’m sorry if I made you think that you would.”)

They still had their letters, could still be friends, and anything more would have been a mistake, but Raoul has never forgotten that moment when Harry’s lips were just about to brush his, and he was almost about to let them.

(He has always been grateful, to that little thing inside, that whispered _enough_ , and saved them.)


	25. 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note that this chapter includes references to the AIDS crisis

He dreamed of Jack the other night.

Not Jack as he was, gaunt and ill, but Jack as he might have been, if he had been well. Strong, and broad, that mischief in his eyes all the brighter, his hair curling beneath his ears, dark and elegant. Artistic, the winding veins in the backs of his hands. And in the dream, he, Raoul, was not an old man anymore, either. Seventy years had fallen away, he could feel it, and when Jack’s hand cupped the back of his neck, and drew him in for a kiss, he smiled into his mouth and felt it as real as if those lips truly were pressed to his, in the waking world.

He woke alone, in his own bed, of course, the first grey light of morning creeping around the edge of the curtains. So quiet, only the odd rumble of cars out in the street, and he had no inclination to move, no inclination to do anything, except stay lying there, watching the light brighten and move into the room, and think of Jack.

Twenty days, now, is all that’s left.

(Twenty-four years, down to twenty days.)

He wonders if he’ll be dreaming of Jack at the end.

* * *

He dreamed of Jack, too, in the winter of 1982.

He had a bad dose of the flu, his bones aching and the room spinning every time he opened his eyes, the sweat pumping through his skin, and as he slipped between sleep and waking, Philippe came to him, and held his hand like he did when he was a boy, and whispered things that Raoul couldn’t remember when he woke again, but then he’d slip back into sleep, and Philippe would be still there, just as he remembered him, tired and pale, and smiling gently, small lines edging the corners of his eyes, his hair glowing just slightly in the light. And then he slept, and Philippe wasn’t there, but Jack was, and Jack held his hand to his lips and kissed his fingers, and Raoul hardly dared speak in case he’d go away, hardly dared move in case he was only a phantasm, but Jack whispered for him to sleep, and when he said that the room was spinning, and he hardly had the breath for words, Jack kissed his forehead and whispered that it was only the streptomycin, only the vertigo, and that made sense in a distant sort of way, so Raoul closed his eyes, and felt Jack’s fingers cold on his cheek, and slept.

(Thirty years since the streptomycin caused his vertigo, thirty years since Jack died, but through his fever-haze he didn’t question the words of a ghost.)

When he woke again there was no one there and the room was dark, and he couldn’t get his breath until he sat up and that made the spinning twice as bad, made his heart pound in his chest, and as he gasped and fought for air he thought of Sorelli and knew he had to call her.

The phone beside his bed, and his fingers fumbled over the numbers in the darkness, but he got it and heard the dial-tone, and Sorelli’s voice was groggy on the line.

He doesn’t remember what he said, only that he said something, and she sounded wide awake when she answered, “I’m on my way.”

* * *

(She told him, afterwards, that she found him unconscious when she got there, and she’d already called the ambulance because she knew something was wrong, and he didn’t wake even when she shook him and slapped his face.)

(They hadn’t wanted to let her go in the ambulance with him, but she insisted, and held his hand the whole time.)

(He remembers the brush of her fingers, and nothing else.)

* * *

Pneumonia, the worst he’s ever had, and he was in hospital for three weeks, pumped with antibiotics and painkillers and with a tube in his chest because his left lung had collapsed.

Sorelli didn’t berate him, this time, for not calling her faster, and that was the most frightening.

* * *

Sorelli insisted he stay with her until he was fully well, and it was almost like how it had been once, only for how much older they both were.

* * *

On the day he turned sixty, he went to visit his parents’ grave.

(He always visited it a couple of times a year, but he thinks now he should have visited it more, made more of an effort. But he was so young when they died that the only one he remembers in any way is his father, and the grief that he feels like he should feel has always been distant.)

He visited them, and brought them flowers, and thought of the sisters he’d never met, and what they might have been like. Thought of his mother, that woman known only from photographs and Philippe’s memories, and what she would have thought of him, her one surviving son.

She must have been proud of Philippe. Maybe she would have been proud of him, too.

And their father, their father that Philippe said was never the same after the war. What things must he have seen? What hopes did he have for his sons?

Didn’t matter, really. Philippe dead, and him the only one left. Their father would never have thought of that.

* * *

He went to visit Philippe, too, and brought him flowers as well, and it struck him as he stood there that had Philippe lived he would have been brushing up against eighty years old. And the thought of Philippe _old_ almost made him laugh, in an odd sort of way that caught in his chest.

It was there that Christine found him. There, and she was from far in the future, (2052, he learned after, far in the future even from now), and she linked her arm with his, and took his hand.

“Your birthday is no day to be alone,” she said, and he managed a smile for her, and kissed her cheek, and together they went to find Sorelli.

* * *

It was later that year that Sorelli learned, through her contacts in London, that there was a director planning a film about Philippe.

A dramatic film, in which someone would play Sorelli herself as she had been in her twenties, and someone would play Philippe, and it was going to culminate in his death. It was still going to be Buquet who blew up his boat, and Buquet was still going to be an IRA man, but in this film he was going to do it because the fictional Sorelli had been his lover first.

Bad enough to make Philippe’s life and death into entertainment, but to twist the facts in such a way for the sake of _drama_ , to implicate Sorelli in any way in his death—

She was livid when she came to him. Livid, and it was all he could do to keep her from jumping on the first plane and going to London and giving that director a piece of her mind. Such a thing wouldn’t work, would only cause trouble for her and he couldn’t have that no matter how badly he wanted to hit the man himself, but they had to find a better way to stop it.

They agreed on the law, agreed that they would both engage their solicitors on the matter, and get them to see what could be done, and Sorelli went to London but did not meet with the director. She took the case to another solicitor she knew there, and had him draft papers to block the film, on the grounds that it would damage her good name and Philippe’s name too. Raoul drew it up in the press, wrote an article in the _Irish Times_ and sent letters to the London _Times_. Noël, too, wrote several letters to the papers with the scathing tone he always had a talent for, and between them all they got the project stopped.

The relief, on the day that confirmation came, was enough that Raoul had to sit down.

The tears still came anyway.

* * *

The problem of AIDS was a growing one in those years. It was mostly considered an American concern, and not one they need worry about in Ireland. But he worried about it, and the small but growing number of cases, and wrote about it under his own name, not caring if it caused people to suspect he might be gay.

(Gay. Such a strange word on his tongue, and it didn’t sit quite right when for so long he had called himself a homosexual in his mind, even if the world didn’t know that.)

So he wrote about it, and when Sorelli was interviewed on the _Late Late Show_ she insisted on talking about it, on moving the discussion away from her career to address what they both considered far more important. It caused a flood of complaints to the broadcasting authority, for such a thing to be so openly talked about on television, but the controversy only angered her more.

When Gay Health Action was founded in February 1985, he joined it, and decided he didn’t really care what anyone said about him.

Publishing pamphlets and calling on the government to do something to help, to lift the restrictions on condoms and decriminalize homosexuality, didn’t feel like enough, but it was all he could do to help.

* * *

He wondered, of course, about himself. The last man he had been with was David and that was eight years before, but was that enough to mean he didn’t have it somewhere within him? Enough to mean that it wasn’t taking its time, getting ready to show some sort of sign?

He knew what it was like to live with a disease that wanted to kill you. But there had been ways of treating TB, even though he knew he had it he knew too there was a chance for him, but this— this was something far different.

He didn’t tell Sorelli his real reason, told her only that he was overdue doing it, but he went to Belfast to spend a week with Harry and his family, go to the libraries and museums, and while he was there he got himself tested.

One way or the other, he needed to know.

Harry was the only one he told, because he needed someone to know, needed to put some form on it, and Harry was married to Sheila but they had loved each other once, and Harry had loved Jack and other men too, so he could, in some way, understand.

So he told Harry, who agreed to keep it a secret until they knew for sure, and in those days as they waited for the test results, Harry did his best to keep him occupied, and keep him from thinking about it.

The cinemas, and the libraries. Pubs, music. Walking. Plenty of walking. In that week they must have walked most of Belfast.

There was only one incident, a UVF bomb in the night, but it was no where near them, and in the morning the soldiers were passing outside when Sorelli rang, frantic, from Cork. It was all he could do to assure her he was all right, all he could do not to tell her that there might be something else to worry about.

The results came back negative, and the relief was weakening.

Harry, when he told him, hugged him and wept.

* * *

He decided to go to Clare, on his way down to Cork to see Sorelli and tell her. But before Clare and Jack’s grave, he stopped in Connemara, to see the Brownes. He hadn’t told them either that he was going to Belfast to get himself tested, but Noël wanted him to jog his memory about how things had been in the fifties, because he was putting the finishing touches to his book. Raoul always liked Connemara, even if for years he couldn’t think about it without thinking about how he and Jack had dreamt of settling there.

He stayed for three days, three days that seemed oddly removed from the world after the week he had just had. They went for walks along the craggy shore, and Phyllis made scones (he always loved her scones) and talked over old times, and the peace of it did his soul good.

* * *

Clare, and Jack’s grave.

He picked up a bouquet of roses from the florist in the town, and the woman quirked a brow when he said they were for a friend, but she didn’t know the half of it.

He set them down at the headstone, and didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything only felt the swelling ache in his chest, a little bittersweet, and he smiled to think that Jack would write poetry about the romance of it, about going to visit him when he was thirty-three years dead, longer dead than alive, and still not knowing what to say.

It was bright, just a little cold, the breeze blowing in off the ocean, and he took one of the roses, and plucked the petals off it, and scattered them to the wind.

* * *

It was dark when he arrived in Cork City, and he found the address Sorelli had given him of the house she would be staying in, that she had leased for the estimated length that filming would take, and knocked on the door.

It was just starting to drizzle, the streetlights casting an orange glow, and when she opened the door, she stared, just for a minute, to see him.

“What are you doing down here?”

It was a thrill to think he could still shock her. “I came to see you, of course. Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

She snorted and stepped aside to let him pass, and closed the door.

“I’ve something to tell you,” he said, in the quiet of the hallway, and regretted his words instantly when the colour drained from her face.

“Don’t say that you’ve—”

He shook his head, and hugged her. “That’s what I want to tell you,” he whispered in her ear, the tears he’d been fighting all along making him hoarse. “I got myself tested. I don’t have it.”

For a long minute she didn’t speak, her tears damp against his neck. Then she exhaled slowly, her voice trembling, and murmured, “thank God.”

_Thank God._

* * *

(So many young men sick, so many young men dying. And this time, too, he was destined to survive, and even though, logically, he knows it was because of how careful he was even without knowing he was being careful, he couldn’t help but wonder, _why?_ )


	26. 26

Christine comes to see him, and she’s not in the mood for talking, something far away in her eyes, and he knows she’s not long home from the past.

She makes tea for them both, and smiles at him as she passes his mug to him, then she goes to the television and fiddles with the DVD player. He can work it himself, well enough, but mostly he has it for her. Through the years all his old videotapes have migrated onto the discs thanks to different Christines — mostly future ones, come back to see him. Mostly they’re recordings of Sorelli, all the films she was in that were released onto tape. And Christine, through her technical skills, found more of them on the internet, and put them on discs for him.

It always feels a little strange, watching the interviews now that she’s gone. But Christine likes them, so he doesn’t mind, but it feels, sometimes, like watching the most intangible of ghosts.

(He has a whole collection of Noël, too, and it’s not as strange with him but sometimes it does catch him just a little off guard. He’s never told her that, in case it would keep her from watching them, and just because it catches him a little strange doesn’t mean it should affect her.)

This time it’s a film she goes for, one of the ones she found on some website. _Two strikes to midnight_ , 1947. One of Sorelli’s first proper feature films and it strikes him that she was so very young in it, playing an actress in an entanglement with a director, her hair so dark and curled, that proud angle of her head.

Sorelli as she was, seventy years ago. God but it’s unsettling to think of it like that.

Seventy _years_.

Christine settles on the couch beside him, the brush of her hand shaking him out of his thoughts, and he squeezes that hand gently.

“What made you choose this one?” his voice is soft under the starting music, and she leans her head against his shoulder.

“I was just back there.”

He smiles to himself, and sits back, ready to see his oldest friend again, as she once was.

* * *

(Both of them will be asleep by the end of it, together on the couch, but he’ll wake first, her head heavy against his shoulder, and he won’t want to wake her, not when she needs the sleep, so he’ll sit there as long as it takes, watching the television returned to the silent starting screen, the angle of Sorelli’s face and her dark lipstick in the black and white, and he won’t think very much at all, except how fortunate he is to have Christine in his life, how fortunate he’s been to know her.)

(He wouldn’t give up a minute of knowing her for anything in the world.)

* * *

(After she wakes, she helps him to the kitchen, his bones stiff, and insists on making tea for him even when he says he’s fine. When Erik arrives, it lightens his heart to see them together, to see the mischief in Erik’s face as he says, “I knew I’d find you here, Mrs Ansborough,” and she swats him and answers, “Call it a lucky guess, Mr Daaé,” and the teasing of them makes Raoul smile to himself.)

(This dear pair. How much duller would his life be without them?)

* * *

In 1986, they made a documentary about Philippe, and about his death.

Someone had found newsreels that had him in them, two of them, one with Sorelli. And it was those newsreels that gave the BBC the notion that there should be something made, especially after the controversy over the film that he and Sorelli had stopped. They asked Sorelli if she’d be involved in it, and if she could persuade him to go to London to give an interview, and she agreed to be involved but only on the grounds that they came to Dublin, and did it properly, with footage of Glasnevin and Dublin Bay, and interview him in his own office.

He agreed, on condition that they bring the newsreel clips with them and show him Philippe.

Philippe in 1936, freshly back from one of his trips to Paris. Tall, and thin, laughing in black and white, turning a grin on the camera, and Raoul’s heart caught in his chest, the tears prickling his eyes, to have his brother brought back to him across fifty years, just as he remembered him.

As if he could reach out, and touch him. As if that smile could be turned to him. That laugh an echo in his head.

He swallowed against the lump in his throat, and Sorelli squeezed his hand tight. The next clip was the one with her, her arm linked with Philippe’s as they left a theatre in London. She was starring as Kay in _Time and the Conways,_ her performance garnering any number of impressed reviews, and in the clip Philippe smiles down at her, and she glances coyly at the camera, and waves. She has just the slightest limp, from the tuberculosis setting into her leg, and two months later she was in hospital, with that leg in a cage.

(He’s watched that clip so many times in all the years since, both clips. And when he closes his eyes, he can see them as clear as day.)

He squeezed her hand as the clip ended, and her gaze met his, and he nodded.

* * *

They interviewed him in his office, a photo of he and Philippe on his desk, facing the camera. And they asked him about Philippe, about what he was like, and growing up with him, and of course they asked him about the day he died, and the investigation, but after all the years, after writing about it and talking about it so many times, he was ready for those questions, and his voice was steady, his gaze firm as he spoke about it.

He and Sorelli shared a drink afterwards, when they had gone, and for the first time in years they slept in the same bed. It was easier, that night, for both of them.

* * *

The documentary was an excellent production, well-received in both Ireland and Britain, and the letters came to him from all over the country, condolences, words of supports, comments about how well he came across, and how touched these correspondents had been by the story of what had happened.

He kept them all, and replied to each of them.

The one that affected him the most came from London.

Came from Darius.

Before he ever opened the letter, before he turned the envelope over and saw the return address on the back, he knew the writing. His legs trembled as he made it to the kitchen, and sank into his chair.

Darius.

_Darius_.

Darius writing to him.

Thirteen years--

He swallowed hard, and opened the letter.

Darius’ name at the bottom was enough to make his heart ache.

His eyes went back to the top, his throat tight, as he started to read.

* * *

It started with an apology. An apology for having left, and an apology for writing now.

_When I saw you talking about Philippe, I knew I had to..._

_You always did care so much about him...one of the things I loved about you..._

_I know it’s too much to ask, I know I have no right, but if we could maybe be friends..._

_I’m sorry._

(He put the letter away, and didn’t look at it for three days, and didn’t mention it to Sorelli. But when he was ready, when he had steadied enough that the thought of it didn’t make his heart falter, he sat down and wrote a reply, and sent it.)

(Maybe he and Darius would never be able to be friends after what they had been to each other, maybe it would always be a dull ache in his chest, but writing to him felt as if they could, maybe, learn to move past that.)

* * *

It was November that year when Noël’s book, _Against the Tide_ , was published. He and Sorelli went together to the launch, and Noël insisted on autographing their copies. Raoul still has it, and two spare copies, but that autographed copy is the one he treasures most.

Christine will love it.

There was no future Christine at the launch, but when he and Sorelli made it home afterwards, she was waiting for them. They sat up late that night, reminiscing, and toasting Noël’s good health, and as Christine, that Christine so much older than this Christine he has lived long enough to know in her own time, held that autographed copy, there was the faintest glimmer of a tear in her eye.

He thought, at the time, that it was because she had researched the Mother and Child affair, thought it was because she was remembering the time she spent a week with him in 1951 at the height of the crisis, thought it was because she had been through some of that time with them, but now, looking back, he thinks that was only part of it. Thinks, really, it was because holding that copy reminded her of him, now, in this time, that she had known so many years ago in what was her past, and still his future.

His present, now.

(He really does find it best not to think too much about the intricacies of time.)

* * *

It was Erik who asked him, once, why he didn’t write his own book about Noël. There were so many things that Horgan left out of his biography, and fair enough that there wouldn’t be space to say everything, but he could have said so much _more_ , and it never felt right to Raoul that he didn’t, which was why he wrote his articles, and his letters. But he never wrote his own book, and when Erik asked him, he squeezed his hand, and gave him a weak smile.

“They wouldn’t believe me if I told them the half of it.” Then he swallowed, and added, “Christine will do him wonderful justice.”

Erik squeezed his fingers back, and nodded. “She will.”

* * *

In the spring of 1987, when Noël was winning awards for _Against the Tide,_ Sorelli won two lifetime achievement awards, for fifty years on stage and screen. The first one was awarded in Dublin, and he and Christine both went with her, and applauded louder than anyone as she received it.

The photo in the newspaper the next morning included the three of them, and now he looks at it and laughs to see a Christine who had come more than sixty years into the past on the front page with her own name printed for all to see.

_L-R: Professor Raoul de Chagny, Sorelli Conway, and Ms Christine Daaé at…_

A woman who technically didn’t exist, and if anyone tried to follow up the name they’d come to a dead end. Any historian’s nightmare, but it’s always made him grin to see it just like it did that first morning.

(His own grin in the photograph is decidedly bright, under the influence of the champagne and wine, and the photo doesn’t show Sorelli’s arm linked with his, but the article does mention how he escorted her, which was nothing new by then, because he had been escorting her to these things for decades.)

The second award was in London, and of course he couldn’t go to that one, but he did watch the broadcast on television, with Christine sitting beside him on the couch as they shared champagne and toasted Sorelli and her acceptance speech. Then the camera panned to her table, and there was another Christine sitting there, and for a moment both of them gaped at the screen, until the Christine with him snorted when the camera panned away again, and he almost choked with laughter on his champagne.

When Sorelli came home two days later, both Christines had returned to their own times, and when he told her about it she grinned and said it was clearly because she was irresistible.

(He swatted her arm, and she snorted and laughed.)

* * *

He’s wondered whether or not to tell Christine about that. She’d love to hear it, that coincidence of time that had her in two places at once and both in the past, both something _good_ , but he’s decided not to. There are enough things that she’s known about before they happened. Let her find this one when it _does_ happen, in time, and she’ll enjoy it all the more.


	27. 27

Alex Daaé comes to see him one morning.

He’s always liked Alex. It was 1947, he thinks, when they first met, and that time Alex was coming from 1998. And he was mostly there to see Christine, of course, but it felt like the oddest possible thing in the world to meet the man. And that was before he knew he was dead in the time that Christine herself was coming from. How much stranger must it have been for her, to go seventy years into the past and meet her father who was dead in her time and hadn’t been born in the time she’d found herself in? Terribly strange, he imagines.

It hasn’t happened yet, he doesn’t think, for her. If it had he thinks she would have told him. She usually tells him, now, when she runs into some past version of him, and even when she doesn’t. He always enjoys it, seeing his younger self through her eyes, hearing about the world that time has left behind.

But Alex comes to see him, and knowing that it will be the last time he sees Alex cuts something deep inside. Before this he’s always been able to tell himself that in all likelihood they’ll meet again. That the man will come forward to see Christine and they’ll get to have a cup of tea and a chat. Even after the wedding last year, knowing that his life could now be measured in months, he still expected that he would see Alex again, and so he has.

This time, he knows it’s the last time.

And Alex knows it too. He can see it in his eyes after he stumbles down the stairs (and that was the first sign, that Alex had come to see him this time and not Christine. When he heard the thud he thought it was her, until he realised it was a slightly heavier step, and then he knew). Alex didn’t expect to find him so old, and when he gives the date as 5 March 2017, he sees the realisation dawn in Alex’s eyes.

So he pushes himself out of his chair, and straightens up, and insists on making tea, even when Alex tries to persuade him to let him do it instead.

He still has it in him to these things, to act a little younger, just for a while.

Alex, as it happens, has come forward from 2006, his blond hair streaked grey. When he was younger he looked very like Christine, always wore his hair slightly long, and even the grey hair is very like some of the older Christines that Raoul has known.

It’s not right, really, that he should have lived such a long life, when Alex died at thirty-nine. At thirty-nine he was busy falling off that damn ladder and landing himself in hospital with his broken leg while Noël and Darius were protesting the Cuban missiles.

Frightening to think of it like that.

(What gave him the right to live all these decades when he had no family, no daughter, and never would have? Why could Alex not have lived instead and spared Christine that grief?)

(What, and why, the questions that have haunted his life, and it’s best not to think of them, now.)

He doesn’t mention the unfairness of it to Alex, of course, just makes him tea and takes a packet of chocolate digestives out of the cupboard. Alex always likes the chocolate digestives and that’s something too he passed on to Christine.

“You don’t have to go to such trouble,” Alex says, the hint of a smile playing around the corner of his mouth, and Raoul shrugs.

“I don’t have many opportunities left.”

A slight flicker, a downturned lip, and then, “How long have you known?”

The answer comes easily, familiar now, comfortable. “Twenty-four years.” And as Alex blinks, and looks from the tea back up to him, he shrugs again. “How long have you known and not told Christine that you’re going to die?”

Alex winces, a flicker of pain across his face, and his voice is soft as he whispers, “Nine years. It wasn’t long after she first went into the past.”

Raoul nods, and smiles wryly. “We’ve both been keeping secrets.”

* * *

(“Thank you for being there for her when I couldn’t.” “I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”)

* * *

The first time he met Alex Daaé in what Christine calls linear time was 1988. Alex was nineteen, a student in his module on Irish Nineteenth-Century Politics, one of twenty. Raoul had known him for decades by then, the older version of him who might turn up once every couple of years having been cast back from his own time. The first morning he walked into the hall, he saw this blond boy with his hair growing down to his shoulders, and something about him seemed familiar but he couldn’t place why.

It was when he went around the room, asking everyone their names, and that familiar-not familiar face said, “Alexander Daaé,” that he realised who was here before him.

Christine’s _father_.

The shock of it left him lightheaded and he had to sit down.

Alex, of course, didn’t know him because he hadn’t met him yet, in the past or the future. For a moment Raoul’s brain completely blanked on what he was supposed to be talking about. He started rambling about Parnell and how the British tried to slander his name, and knew they’d all be calling him eccentric by the end of the class, but it was the first thing he could think of and he needed to get his thoughts in order.

Christine’s _father,_ his _student_.

Only he wasn’t her father yet, and wouldn’t be for years to come.

It struck him for the first time that he didn’t know when Christine would be born, and he decided against asking her the next time she came. She probably wouldn’t tell him anyway.

* * *

Alex only missed a handful of classes that semester, with the excuse that he was ill, but Raoul didn’t mind. How could he, when he knew the boy was travelling through time and it wasn’t by choice? Such trouble he had keeping it secret that he knew, because that would only lead to questions, and he didn’t think Christine’s father would appreciate it too much if he found out about his future daughter from one of his lecturers. So he kept quiet, and when Alex walked in late one day and said how he was delayed by his car breaking down, Raoul just waved him to his seat, even knowing that neither he nor Christine had ever driven a day in their lives.

How he managed to survive those twelve weeks he will never understand.

* * *

(“Thank you for all you’ve done for me, too.” “I only wish I could have done more.”)

* * *

It was only afterwards, only early in the next year, that he mentioned it to Christine that her father had been one of his students. He didn’t know if she knew or not, didn’t know if her father had ever mentioned it to her (didn’t know at the time how young she had been when her father died), and this Christine was as old as him, in her sixties too, but she smiled when he told her, and said it was nice to know.

(He’s almost told this younger Christine, too, of linear time, but every time he’s tried the words have caught in his throat, so maybe it is that she isn’t supposed to know yet, and he hates that they haven’t been able to talk about him properly.)

* * *

It was fifty years, that year, since Philippe’s death. Half a century since his life was robbed from him. Put like that, in years, it seemed so much longer.

Raoul wondered, briefly, if he should have organised a Mass for him. It would be the expected thing to do, but without even mentioning it to Sorelli he decided against it. Philippe had been moving away from the Church when he died, and if he had lived and seen everything that happened since, that transformation would surely have been completed. Organising a Mass for him would seem dishonest.

He took the day off from work instead, and so did Sorelli. Together they went to the graveyard, in their traditional way, and brought a bouquet of lilies and another of irises. And they stood there a long time, holding each other’s hands, and not saying much at all.

What would Philippe think, if he could have seen them? Both of them, aged inconceivably from how he had known them, Sorelli after taking up using a cane because the cold of the winter had caused the old ache in her leg to play up. In his darkest dreams, would he ever have imagined what happened?

* * *

They went home together, and looked at old photographs of him, and lit every candle in the house. Then they lay down on the old bed still in Philippe’s room, that Christine sometimes stayed in when she came, and whispered, quietly, of their last memories of him, so fragile after so many years.

(“He kissed me and told me he’d see me tomorrow.” “I got a letter from him that morning. He was making arrangements for the Easter holidays, when I would be off school.” A slight laugh. “We were going to go sailing.”)

(“I knew from the very start that you were the dearest person in the world to him.” “I knew from the moment he introduced us that you were different to the others he’d brought home.”)

Between the two of them, it was the best way, really, to mark it.

* * *

At the end of the semester, right before the summer holidays, they named him the new head of the History Department.

He’d applied for it, interviewed for it, but he didn’t really think he’d get it. True he had forty years of publications and research and conferences to his name, but he’d never taught anywhere other than Trinity, aside from a semester or two at Queens at different times. It didn’t feel like there was anything really to set him apart, and he’d set himself up that he’d probably lecture on for another few years and be content with that.

The day they phoned him to tell him the news, he almost laughed when he was still on the line. When he hung up, he scratched the back of his hand, to be sure he could feel it, be sure it was real. And when that stung beneath his nails and his heart was pounding, he knew then that it was no dream.

He dreamed up, and restrained the urge to yell so as not to disturb anyone else in the building, then went outside and ran the length of the courtyard.

Looking back, he’s sure it added to the rumours of his eccentricity. Students, groups of friends, couples all gathered under the trees each side, talking, laughing in the grass, and him racing past. They must have thought he’d finally lost it, but all he knew was that he had to run, he had to move, he was head of department and his heart was racing and he had _to do something_.

He raced back to his office, took the steps two at a time, and collapsed into his chair. And in the breathless laughter he poured himself whiskey from the bottle under his desk, and rang Sorelli.

(She must have heard the breathlessness, because the first thing she asked was, “what’s wrong?” and he laughed and said “nothing, nothing at all, but I’m after getting the best news…” She shrieked the shriek that he couldn’t when he told her, and he laughed louder than he had ever laughed in his office, not caring who heard him in the rooms either side.)

* * *

There was only one man to ask to take his official photograph.

Harry.

Harry made the trip down from Belfast specially for it, and Raoul put on his academic gown, his glasses, fixed himself into his chair with his book on Casement in his lap, doing his best to look stern when it was all he could do to keep from grinning. Not proper, to have the head of department grinning in his official photograph, but how could he help himself? _Him_ , head of department, and Harry photographing him. Restraining himself from grinning was the most difficult thing to ask him to do.

(“I know it’s hard but you just have to sit still, Raoul.” “I’m doing my best!”)

The final product is perfect. Him in his scarlet gown edged with the yellow silk, sitting back in his chair with his legs crossed, glasses perched on the end of his nose, the book open in his hand. The lightness of his hair adds to the sternness, its flyaway style adding a touch of eccentricity. The best official photograph he ever had taken, and when he told Harry that, Harry winked.

“You know I do my best work when it comes to you.”

* * *

Harry stayed for a visit after taking the photograph, and told Sheila he’d gained a new commission. It wasn’t quite a lie, because for the week he stayed with Raoul they went through Jack’s old poems, and his photographs, and assembled the best of them into a collection.

He’d been published in journals when he was alive, had exhibitions of his photography, but he didn’t live long enough to have a published collection. The journals were obsolete, the exhibitions long forgotten, and it felt wrong to have these pieces of his art and not put them into the world somehow for people to see, to know how brilliant he had been.

So they set themselves the task, and chose what they would include in a collection of his writing, of his photos. Jack, the one who brought them together as friends, and as lovers, and then as friends again. Only right, that they should honour him together, and they talked about him as they went through it all, remembered him and how he had been, and Harry laughed to find some old photographs of himself that Jack had taken before he was ill, artistic platinotypes of him by the water, one with him nude, sprawled on his back, beautiful in the light of the sun, forty years younger. Raoul offered to let him keep them if he wanted, but Harry shook his head.

“He gave them to you, and anyway, I’m fairly sure I have my own copies tucked away somewhere.”

Raoul couldn’t find words to write a preface for the little collection, the grief still too close after all of the years, but Harry did, and wrote a tribute to their dear lost companion.

It was Raoul who found the publisher, a limited run. But it put Jack’s name into the papers, and he would have loved that, if he could have known.


	28. 28

He’s written out his will several times through the decades. The first time was when he learned of his tuberculosis, more than sixty years ago, and later iterations of it didn’t change much, everything generally left to Sorelli, with things to go to Harry or Darius at different times. Then Sorelli died, and he re-wrote it for everything to go to Alex Daaé instead, with a letter explaining in case he died before Alex went back and met him in 1947. And then he rewrote the letter once he knew that Alex would have met him, to account for that. Then Alex died, and he rewrote it all again for everything to go to Christine, which is how it remains, now, except for a few small things to go to Erik and Anea instead.

He has, of course, written out instructions for _after,_ on the matter of his funeral and how he should like it to be, but Christine knows it already. It’s mostly there to keep her from worrying that she might remember things wrong, and he keeps a copy of it on his desk – because he knows her and where she’s likely to hide herself if she needs to – and Anea has another copy, for a couple of years now.

She looked at him askance as he told her what was in the envelope, and he assured her there was nothing to worry about, that he just wanted everything in order as much as possible.

(The last time he was in hospital, with the pneumonia, he filled out all the forms to be sure that they wouldn’t try to revive him when the time comes, to have it on record. He knows he’s not going to live past that day, and at his age it would be indecent to look for more time.)

Some might consider it morbid to think on such things, but he’s just being practical.

* * *

He did worry, in the winter of 1990, that that will he’d written out was going to be needed.

It had been a busy few months, campaigning alongside Sorelli to have Mary Robinson elected president, once they knew that Labour were nominating her and not Noël. The best woman for the job, Robinson, and the first woman to be elected to it, and when the news came through in the count centre that they had done it, he swept Sorelli into his arms and swung her around like he had all the way back in 1948 when they first had Noël elected.

That was when he felt the first twinge of something in his chest, but it passed in a moment and when she noticed that his grin had faltered, he shrugged off her concern, and hugged her tighter.

Between the campaign, all the administrative work as head of department, his own lectures and research (Irish soldiers in WWI, this time), and supervising three PhDs at different stages, he was just so busy.

He awarded Alex Daaé his gold medal in history, and wished him well with his Masters up in Queens, and wondered not for the first time how far in the future Christine was, and there was another twinge in his chest, this one sharper than the first a few nights earlier, but he swallowed down the breathlessness and smiled at this young man who was something of a prodigy.

He was due to go to Belfast himself for a weekend, and to see Harry’s new photographic exhibition, but in the end it wasn’t to be.

He was having dinner with Sorelli when the pain came again, spreading into his back, sharp enough that it made him drop his fork, and she frowned at him.

“Are you feeling alright?”

He gasped around the pain, around the bile rising acid in his throat, and nodded, and reached for his glass of water.

“Fine.” It sounded weak to his own ears.

“I really don’t think you are.”

He was just beginning to think that himself, the sweat beading cold on his skin, but he shook his head not to worry her. “I am.”

She looked down at his fist clenched on the table, as he swallowed another breath, and shook her head. “I don’t care what you say. I’m ringing Noël.”

She stood up and walked out into the hall while he was focusing on breathing, blinking against his vision threatening to blur, willing the pain to ease, and then she was back searching through the cupboard, and she produced the box of Disprin.

“He said to give you aspirin and get you to a hospital.”

It was more than he was able for to argue with her, and when he nodded her mouth set into a firm line.

* * *

A heart attack. They carried out some sort of procedure on his heart by going in through a vein in his arm (Noël tried to explain the science of it to him, but it was too much to really take in) and he spent two weeks in hospital while they tried to get his blood pressure under control.

When Sorelli heard he’d been having odd pains for a few days and done nothing about them, she gave him the sternest talking to she ever had in all the times he’d landed himself in hospital, but her face was pale and pinched, and her eyes bloodshot, and he knew he’d frightened her terribly this time, so he let her, and whispered that he was sorry, which made her shush him and fret about him wearing himself out.

If she gripped his hand tight enough to make it ache, he didn’t comment.

* * *

Harry came to see him one of the days, and he, too, was paler than Raoul could remember seeing him since the day after Jack died, and instead of sitting down in the chair where Sorelli spent most of her time, he pulled him in for a hug.

“Christ I was frightened when she rang to tell me.”

And Raoul didn’t miss the tears that he wiped away.

* * *

Christine came to see him, too, while he was still in hospital. A younger Christine than he had seen in a long time, come back from October 2017 (which doesn’t seem all that far away, now). Of course he didn’t know, at the time, that they would know each other in her lifetime, certainly didn’t know that he would have recently died when she was coming from, so when she came into his room, this young Christine like the one he had first known all those years ago, and her eyes, too, were bloodshot, watering as if she was on the verge of tears, he wondered what terrible thing had happened when she was coming from, but decided it best not to ask, in case it would upset her more.

When she took his hand, he squeezed her fingers, and tried to think of what to say that would not in any way spoil her future.

“I feel fine,” he said, and smiled at her so she might believe him, and her own smile was watery.

“I knew you’d say that.”

* * *

(The most amusing episode of his time in hospital was later that day when Noël came to see him. Christine was still with him, cheered up now, telling him that her thesis was going well, and when Noël found her there he stopped and stared. He opened his mouth to say something, and then closed it again, and then, “Do I know your mother?” And it took Raoul a moment to realise he meant the older Christine, but Christine herself was faster, and nodded, “You might. People say we’re very alike.” And that answer was enough to satisfy Noël and he extended his hand and she took it and shook it. “A pleasure to meet you, Miss...” "Daaé." "Miss Daaé.")

(He didn’t stay long, and after he left Raoul nearly choked on a laugh, and beside him there were tears trickling down Christine’s cheeks as she grinned. “I can’t believe I met him, I can’t believe it.” And Raoul kissed her hand, and grinned at her. “You’ll meet him many more times, I promise.”)

* * *

The whole affair of his heart attack persuaded him that he needed to slow down his work. Sorelli insisted he stay with her in Wicklow after his release from hospital, and it was more than his life was worth to argue over it. So he spent Christmas with her, and was still there when his birthday rolled around, and by then, almost two months since he landed in hospital, he had made up his mind.

He would have to retire. Step down from head of the department, continue to supervise his PhD students until they had submitted, but he could do that easy enough. And when they were finished, then retire fully. He’d be seventy, but, he supposed, it would be time to retire, at seventy.

The only thing he could do, if he wanted to live much longer, as his doctors reminded him.

Though Sorelli, too, had reduced her workload as she got into her seventies, she was still busy directing films. With his decision to retire, she decided that the time had come for her to do the same. She was about to turn seventy-seven, had taken to wearing glasses, and insisted that he was the cause of most her grey hair with all the times he’d worried her over his health. She handed over the reins of her current project to her assistant, and set about reorganizing her garden with enthusiasm.

She was less enthusiastic the day Darius came to see him, shortly before he headed back to Dublin with his strength recovered. It was only when she’d brought him the stack of post that had arrived while he was in hospital that she found a letter from Darius, and discovered that they were back in contact. He hadn’t told her simply for the fact that he knew she wouldn’t approve after how things had ended, and though he regretted keeping it a secret he still felt it was the best thing to have done.

She’d presented him with the letter, and a quirked brow, and he’d sighed and knew he had to explain himself.

“I just want you to be careful,” she’d said, and he squeezed her hand, and nodded.

“I know.”

The day Darius came, they took tea in her garden. It was the first time in almost eighteen years that he had seen Darius, and he found him changed terribly with time, his face lined and hair grey, his edges softened. And Raoul knew he must have changed a great deal too, in those eighteen years, but he didn’t think he’d changed all that much, until Darius squeezed his hand and said, “you’re thinner than I remember.”

If that was a good thing or a bad thing, Raoul couldn’t decide.

* * *

Darius went back with him to Dublin, and though they agreed that they would not be rekindling their relationship it was nice to have him in the house again, in a quiet sort of way, for the few days that he stayed. And then he was gone again, back to London, but it was not the severance that it had once been.

It felt quiet, and right.

* * *

Christine and Sorelli were the ones who helped him clear out his office in the history department. The office that had been his for forty years, since he was a newly conferred Doctor of History, and now he was leaving it for the last time.

There were tears in his eyes as he packed the boxes, and every so often Sorelli would squeeze his arm, or Christine would take his hand, and having them there made it easier.

They argued over him carrying the boxes to his car, on account of his heart, but he felt perfectly fine and a good deal better than he had before he got sick, so he insisted on carrying some of them.

He suspects, even now, that Christine took the heaviest ones.

All the books, the letters, the essays and journals. Notebooks, photographs. His gown, and that gown still hangs on the back of the door of his study. All the assorted bits and pieces of forty years working in the one room.

It didn’t seem real, his office, empty and echoing, as he closed the door on it for the last time.

* * *

Most of what he remembers of that first summer of his retirement is long walks in Bray with Sorelli, is learning to garden properly for the first time. There was the trip to Clare to visit Jack’s grave, and the roses he brought this time were delicate and ones that he had grown himself. Harry and Sheila came to stay with him for a week, and it eased some of the strangeness of his new situation to have familiar voices in the house. Christine was a regular caller, more regular than he had known her to be in years, popping in and out from a whole range of different times in the future, and maybe if so much else hadn’t been new and strange that would have been the thing to make him realise that 1991 was not a normal summer, was not a normal year.

It was, in fact, the last normal year. But he didn’t know that at the time, so every time she came with Sorelli, no matter when she was coming from, he hugged her and made her tea and they navigated the fragments of visits that had happened for him and not happened yet for her, the usual negotiation through the pieces of their friendship.

How Sorelli managed it he never asked her, and he wishes now he had. He would have liked to know.

Maybe that was why she spent so much time keeping records of things.

The autumn was cold and it made his bones sore, but it was frosty and crisp and he experimented a bit with photographing the trees and the plants in the garden, but it wasn’t in any serious sort of way. He still had his letters to Darius, and ones to Harry, but he felt a little lost, to not have lectures to organize, and students, and exams and essays to mark, and conferences to prepare for.

The times he went to stay with Sorelli, or she came to stay with him, they went back to staying in the one bed, both of them a little lost, with the changes in their lives.

They talked about Philippe more than they had in years. He’s glad, now, that they did.

Christmas they spent in his house, that year, and on St Stephens’ morning they went to Glasnevin and brought a wreath to lay for Philippe.

He never regretted not loving women, but that winter he did regret, just a little, not having a son he could have named for his brother.

He broached the question with Sorelli, on New Year’s night, in the earliest hours of 1992, and she sipped her wine, and gazed into the fire, and sighed.

“I couldn’t have married a man I didn’t love,” she said, softly. “And I couldn’t have loved a man after Philippe, and I couldn’t have married someone when I love Christine.” Then she smiled, and said, “So I think it’s turned out for the best.”

* * *

She turned seventy-eight on 12 February, and he took her for dinner. There was nowhere for them to go dancing, so the dancing was in his own living room by the fire, with his ancient record player, and when she laughed it was the most perfect night it could have been.

Even then, there was some part of him whispering, _remember this_. _Remember this always._

* * *

They went together to visit Philippe, as they always did, on his fifty-third anniversary, and she leaned into him and he felt the tears damp on her cheeks.

“God but I miss him terribly,” she whispered, and he hugged her tighter.

“So do I,” he whispered, “so do I.”

Then she laughed. “He’d say we’re both ridiculous still crying over him,” and he smiled to himself, the tears damp in his own eyes. “He would, but he’d be a little bit honoured, too.”

And they were quiet a long time, until she sighed. “I’ve always hated that I couldn’t see him after.”

And the lump was tight in Raoul’s throat, as he swallowed hard against it, and told her, for the first time, of what it was like to be there, of what it had been like to see him for the last time.

(“There was a cut over his eye, and I could feel the stitches beneath my fingers…”)

* * *

He went to visit her on 21 April. He’s always remembered it. He was only there for an hour, had driven down just to say hello, and because he missed her face. And he was bored, too. Bored, and trying to talk himself out of taking on a bigger workload, and if there was anyone who could talk him out of that it was Sorelli.

But she seemed tired, so he didn’t mention it. And when she asked him to come again the next day, he told her he couldn’t, that he had an interview for a documentary about 1798, and it wasn’t a lie. Then she said it would have to wait two days, because she had a meeting about a film someone wanted her to direct about Roger Casement, and she could do with a good historical consultant, if he knew of anyone, and just that hint of mischief in her eyes.

“What happened to being retired?” he asked, and she swatted him.

“I could ask you the same.”

He hugged her before he left, and she kissed his cheek and leaned into him. Whispered, “Mind yourself,” like she did every time he left her, and he said he would, and then she hugged him tighter and followed it with, “you’ve always been my dearest friend,” and he smiled into her hair.

“And you mine.”

She released him, and waved as he drove away, and he watched her fade into the darkness in the rearview mirror.

If he had known it would be the last time he saw her, he would have turned around and pulled her into his arms, and never let her go.


	29. 29

He got up the next morning, 22 April, and phoned to postpone the interview.

He told the boy on the other end of the line that he wasn’t feeling well, and it wasn’t quite a lie because there was something niggling at him. Something about Sorelli, and how tight she’d hugged him.

No matter what he did that morning, he couldn’t settle himself. In the end, he rang her to say that he’d be able to visit after all, and he could hear her smiling on the line when she said, “be here by three, and bring a cake.”

“What for?” He was quite used to her being mysterious, and didn’t expect her to answer, but he asked anyway, and he could tell her smile had broadened when she answered, “We’re having a little party for Christine. Today is the day she’ll be born.”

He never knew before then when Christine’s birthday was, and the thought of he and Sorelli having a little party for her made him smile. “Do you think she’ll appear from the future?”

“I don’t know.” A breath and then, “I have a feeling she might. The cake better be chocolate. You know she loves it.”

And he snorted. “I haven’t a chocolate digestive left to my name with her.”

* * *

He went out, and spent a productive hour and a half searching for the perfect cake with which to celebrate Christine’s birthday. He also invested in a bottle of chartreuse, though he was under orders to avoid alcohol, but he reasoned to himself that Christine being born, somewhere, was justification to have a drink.

If he couldn’t drink to her name, what could he drink to?

And he thought of Alex Daaé, who only a year and a half before finished his undergraduate degree, and somewhere found time – between his own travelling through time – to fall in love and marry. And that boy, who couldn’t be more than twenty-three, was about to become a father.

He tried to think of the Christines he had known, the ages she would have been at. The first one he met, officially, was twenty-four, as far as he could remember. He had known her, too, at twenty-three, though only once or twice. Mostly she was older when she came, mostly she was somewhere between his age and Sorelli’s, and the last time she was, he thought, seventy-two. That that seventy-two-year-old woman, with grey hair and an impish look in her eye, was, at that moment, being born or about to be born, was enough to make his head spin.

He resolved not to think about it, but it sat strange in his mind to think one of his oldest and dearest friends was, right then, only a baby.

Resolution to forget about it or not, it was still there in his head as he pushed open his front door, the cake covered in the car, the chartreuse tucked away. No point bringing them in just for an hour or two. He would make tea, and wash his hair, and change into one of his finer suits before the drive down to Wicklow.

So he thought, and then he stepped into the living room, and heard the footsteps on the stairs, and looked up to find Christine herself, looking about forty, wrapped in his dressing gown.

“I won’t be staying long,” she said, “I can feel it. What’s the date?”

The answer was on his tongue before she even asked, years of habit and practice. “22 April 1992, happy birthday.”

But instead of grinning, like he expected, the colour drained from her face and she stumbled on the last stair. He was at her side in an instant, steadying her before she could fall. She gripped his arm tight, her arm trembling. “Say that again.”

“Happy birth—”

“Not that, the first bit, say it again.” The words were a rush, her eyes wide, her fingers digging in. “Say it, Raoul.”

His mouth was dry with the force of her gaze. “22 April 1992.”

She whimpered, shaking her head. “Oh fuck, oh fuck. You have to go to Sorelli. You have to go now.”

A check in his heart, his head spinning. “What? Why? She said to be there by three.”

“I don’t care what she said, go know. You have to, you can’t delay.” And there were tears in her eyes, tears in her eyes and her voice thick and he brushed them away, his heart pounding, his breath caught in his throat and he didn’t want to ask, he didn’t want to know, didn’t want to hear what she was about to say though he could feel it, he knew it, it was in her words and in her face and in that hug Sorelli gave him before he drove away, she couldn’t say it, it couldn’t be, it couldn’t be—

“Why?” The question slipped out, and he could feel the tightness already in his chest, the black spots dancing at the edges of his vision.

“Today is the day—today—she—today is the day she’s going to die, Raoul. Today is the day she dies.”

The last he saw was Christine’s face, pale, the last he felt was her hand grabbing for him, as the darkness rushed in.

* * *

He came back to himself on the floor, cold and weak, his feet propped on a cushion, Christine kneeling over him.

Brandy, sharp, stinging his lips, and he gasped, the room grey and spinning around him.

Darkness, again, and someone calling his name, someone shaking him. Sorelli? No.

Christine.

He groaned as the room swam, groaned and felt her fingers at his throat, her hand on his chest, the top buttons of his shirt opened. And then he was blinking her back into view, and there was colour this time, but all he could see was the red of her eyes, the tears damp on her cheeks.

He gasped around the pain in his chest, but it wasn’t his heart, not this time.

Sorelli, dying. Sorelli—

He scrambled to his feet, and Christine tried to insist he wait, insist he drink a glass of water instead of driving so soon after passing out, but all he knew was that he had to _go, now_ , had to go and see Sorelli, had to keep her alive, had to—

He felt the shift in the air almost before he knew it, saw his dressing gown lying empty on the floor (Christine, gone, again), and then he was racing out the door and jumping into the car.

* * *

He remembers nothing of that drive to Wicklow.

* * *

What he remembers is the crunch of the gravel beneath his wheels, as he pulled into Sorelli’s driveway. What he remembers is the engine still running as he threw the door open and jumped out. What he remembers is Christine, an older one than the one who had brought him the news, opening the door in time for him to rush through it.

His whole mind blanked the second he saw her, and her mouth twisted, the tears welling in her eyes.

“She’s gone,” she whispered.

It was the second time that day that his strength failed him.

* * *

She had already called the doctor, to confirm it, though there was nothing to be done. And when his legs were still weak beneath him she helped him into the sitting room, where Sorelli—where she was sitting in her armchair, just as if she were asleep.

As if she were asleep.

Christine’s voice, soft. “She dozed off when we were talking, and before I knew—”

He couldn’t speak, could hardly nod, just brushed his lips against Sorelli’s forehead.

She didn’t stir, didn’t stir, and he knew she wouldn’t but—

She was still warm. Still warm.

It was that, more than anything, that made his eyes prickle, and he couldn’t blink away the tears. They slipped into her hair, and he gasped, and closed his eyes, and lay his head against hers.

* * *

The day was a haze, after that.

The doctor, and Christine insisted he look at him, too, after his two collapses, never mind that the reason was clear enough.

He couldn’t bear to be there as they took Sorelli away. He stayed out in the garden, and kept his eyes closed, and held himself still.

The phone calls. Harry, and he doesn’t remember what he said but he remembers Harry’s shaking breath and, “I’ll be there just as soon as I can.”

(A long drive, down from Belfast, and he was there first thing the next morning, pulling him tight into his arms.)

(“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”)

Noël, the long silence on the line, and then, “Do you want me to bring my accordion?”

His accordion. Music, for the funeral. She’d like that.

(Oh, God, the funeral.)

A shaking breath, “Do.”

_Do._

* * *

Her heart. Failing in her sleep, after seventy-eight years. Quick, and painless.

* * *

It was Christine who wrote the statement, to release to the press. He watched her, hardly able to think of words after his phone calls, just watched her and the firm set of her jaw, and knew that she must have known about this for years, maybe decades, and been powerless to stop it, powerless to change it.

Powerless to save the woman she loved.

* * *

How many times must she have grieved Sorelli, in all those decades?

* * *

There was nothing they could do that night, nothing, except exist. He half-expected time to pull Christine away, and what would he do then? But it didn’t, and she stayed, and they lay down together in Sorelli’s guest room, and held each other through the night, neither of them sleeping, neither wanting to be alone.

(Her tears warm on his neck. Her fingertips soft, brushing the dampness from his cheek.)

“How long have you known?” he whispered, somewhere close to dawn.

“Since I was twelve.” Her voice so soft he could hardly hear.

He held her tighter, and kissed her hair. “I’m sorry.”

* * *

The dates in their lives that were be the same.

22 April 1952, the day he met Jack.

22 April 1992, the day Christine was born.

22 April 1992, the day Sorelli died.

Bound, intertwined, and why? How?

* * *

Time. Time dictating. Time ruling their lives.

* * *

The last funeral he’d been in charge of arranging was Philippe’s, and he didn’t even arrange it. Two of his cousins did it for him, and he couldn’t even remember which ones. Sarah and George? Or Marianne and Anthony? Or some others instead? He was never close to them, to any of them. The funeral was the first time he met most of his relations.

But Sorelli’s—

He hated not knowing what to do.

It was Christine that did most of it, her slight smile more a grimace. “I’ve had practice,” she whispered, when he confessed his inability. And he should have done it, shouldn’t have put that burden on her, but he was helpless, and she squeezed his hand as if to say she understood, and whispered, “I’ve been ready for this my whole life.”

All he could do was let her.

He thinks it was a comfort for her, doing it.

* * *

He couldn’t watch the news coverage. He’s seen it since, because a younger Christine found it online and wanted to watch it but didn’t want to be alone so he sat with her and held her hand, and it was the first time he’d seen it. The montage of clips of Sorelli through the years, from films and interviews, on the stage, awards, the film reel with Philippe. Sorelli laughing into the camera, Sorelli defiant, Sorelli insisting on talking about AIDS or the violence in the North or contraception or divorce or abortion or the need to decriminalize homosexuality. Sorelli talking about Philippe, her eyes soft, and a little sad, through all the years.

These pieces of her, and as he watched them, holding Christine’s hand, twenty years after Sorelli had died, after Christine was born, the tears came then, just as fresh as the day that it happened.

“I can turn it off,” Christine whispered, squeezing his fingers, and his heart ached for that dear sweet girl and all she’d been through, and still she was more worried for him.

“Leave it,” he breathed. “Leave it.”

* * *

She had left instructions, and he was so endlessly grateful that she had.

No church service. Burial in the small local graveyard, not in Glasnevin. No prayers, and while he agreed with her about the institution of the Church, their argument was never with the religion itself, more with the use of it, so he and Christine agreed on one ‘Our Father’, and a single ‘Sé do Bheatha a Mhuire.’ For him to recite Auden, if he was up to it, and he decided to follow it with Dylan Thomas. Roses, lilies, and irises. And wildflowers, if there were any to be found (Harry and Sheila assigned themselves to collecting those, when they arrived). To be laid out in her own house, with candles. Private. No huge crowd, no onlookers. A short piece of footage, of the procession to the graveyard, for the news, on the agreement that there be no other cameras. The pallbearers to carry her from the hearse to the grave she left up to him to decide.

Himself, of course. Harry. Noël would have but he was too frail, so he got one of his grandsons to take his place, a young man as tall as him in his youth with that dark hair just a little long, and for a moment Raoul was reminded forcibly of 1948. Harry’s son, too, John, named after Jack, and so very like how Harry himself had been, as a younger man. Foster, the farmer next door, who sold Sorelli the cottage in the first place, and kept her in milk and eggs, and checked in on her when the snow came, and Raoul was caught in Dublin.

They were a man short, and Christine would have joined them, but she was too short beside them.

“It’s fine,” she said, and leaned into him. “It’s fine.”

* * *

Darius.

He turned up at the door the morning before the funeral, grey and tired, with a suit in a tailor’s case.

“I got the first flight I could,” he said. “Oh, Raoul…”

Raoul pulled him in for a hug before he could say another word.

(“I’m not sure she’d be happy with me carrying it.” “She would, because I asked you.” “Even after—” “She forgave you for leaving when she knew I had.”)

* * *

He sat beside her all night, the last night, Christine at her other side, each of them holding her cold hands, neither of them speaking. And what he thought of in those long hours he doesn’t know, really, only that he was mostly remembering, remembering her admonishing him for not being more careful with himself, remembering her happy, remembering her that first time he saw her in Steevens’ Hospital all the way back in 1939 when he told her that Philippe was dead, and how Philippe had hugged him and wept, when he heard the news that she had TB in her bones. Remembering the first time they saw each other after the war ended, and when she introduced him to Christine and how he didn’t believe her that Christine could be a time traveller. Remembering how, when he woke after his lung haemorrhage, after Jack died, she was right there beside him, holding his hand, and how he hated the daily walks she made him take, when he was recovering. How she lay down beside him and held him as he wept after Darius. How she laughed at each election night when it went their way. How every time he wavered, she was there to squeeze his hand. All the times they went to Philippe’s grave, and didn’t speak. How she hugged him, the last time they saw each other, before he drove away.

So many little pieces, all coming back to him, that night.

Her fingers so still, lying between his.

* * *

He took a snip of her hair, and divided it. One small lock, wrapped in pink tissue paper and tied with a ribbon, kept in his desk. A memento mori, and she would have appreciated it, the sentiment behind it. The other small lock the same, wrapped in tissue paper and tied with ribbon, and buried beneath the gravel on top of Philippe’s grave.

* * *

A breezy afternoon, the drizzle just starting, as they lowered her into the ground, Noël’s accordion soft, and mournful. Harry’s fingers warm squeezing his wrist, Darius brushing his back, Christine leaning into him, and he twined his fingers with hers. She brushed her thumb over his knuckles, and held on tight.

Sorelli would have liked it, liked all of it.

It was all he could do to remember the words for Auden, unable to read them, his breath heavy in his lungs.

The drizzle hid his tears.


	30. 30

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note that this chapter includes reference to maternal death

He collected all the tributes to her in all the newspapers, and has them still. When he could find the words, he sat down and wrote his own tribute to her, he who was the one in their time who knew her longest, knew her best. Of course he had to write something for her, so he took a short sabbatical from his weekly newspaper column, and had that published instead.

Finding words to write about her was one of the hardest things he ever had to do, but he did it. Wrote about her, and all that she was to him. How she was the best sister he could have asked for, and the dearest person in the world to him, all about the things she did, and thought, and fought for, and how she took her grief over his brother and turned it into art, on the screen and on the stage, and how he was never less than proud of her.

The things he could say, and so much more that he had to leave out.

* * *

He must have drafted it ten times, to get it just right.

* * *

His favourite, of all the hundreds of others, was the one Noël wrote, sincere, and quiet, and in that quiet sincerity it was worth ten times more than those others overflowing with praise.

* * *

Before writing his own, searching through the newspapers to collect those others, he found the death notice that stalled his heart.

A woman he had never met, but a name as familiar to him as his own.

Daaé.

_DAAÉ, Sylvia (25 April) (née Hughes)…after a short illness at…beloved wife of Alexander (Alex) and mother of baby Christine…_

Baby Christine.

 _Baby_ Christine.

He gasped on the first breath he drew.

* * *

Christine’s mother died, and she was only three days old.

* * *

(His own mother, unbidden in his memory, a ghost all of his life, dead when he was a day old.)

* * *

(Philippe’s funeral, and the blonde girl looking as grief-stricken as he felt, her hand in his. Christine could have passed for his sister, both of them sixteen, mirrors of each other.)

* * *

He didn’t know the woman, had never met her, Christine had never mentioned her to him only that she was dead, never even spoke her name that he could remember.

This was why. She, too, deprived at such a young age like he had been. She, too, with a mother who could never have been a mother, never knowing what it was that she had lost.

That they would be so connected—

And he didn’t know the woman, but he knew Alex in and out of time, and he knew Christine, and he couldn’t in good conscience know of her death, of her funeral, and not attend.

Sorelli would have gone too, if she were not gone already.

Only four days after he wore his best suit to her funeral, he put it on again.

* * *

The church was full, to be expected really. Funerals of young people who ought to be alive always seem to be the busiest.

(He’s wonders, idly now, how big his own funeral will be, with him so long retired, so long on his own, half-forgotten by the world, maybe. A quiet affair, he thinks, and it might be better that way.)

He slipped in at the back, no room for him to sit, hardly room to see the altar with the crowd, and he stood back against the wall, safely hidden.

The heat, the incense, the priest’s voice, were enough to make him feel disjointed, make him feel as if he were watching all this from outside of himself.

A man, who must have been somewhere around his age, did the first reading. A relation of some description, he assumed. (Fabian Valerius, he would later learn, a man he never got to meet, but would have liked to.)

(For the first time, he realized he didn’t know what Christine had in the way of family. He hoped she had more than him.)

It was a woman who did the second reading, her voice steady, and gentle, and that gentleness washed through him, made his chest ache to think of Sorelli and how she should be there standing beside him, would have been, if things had been right.

(Would not have had to be, if the world were fair.)

(And of course he didn’t know it then, but that woman, Anea Valerius, has become one of his dearest friends, too.)

The Gospel reading was about Lazarus. They always seem to like that one at funerals and it always sits heavy in his chest to hear it, when there is a coffin in front of an altar, when just to stop time and go back, just for a few days, is all he or anyone can ache to do, and the thought of resurrection is as intangible as the breeze.

A c _ruel_ sort of reading, at a time like that.

He closed his eyes against the tears, swallowed hard.

The eulogy, quiet, softly spoken. Sylvia Daaé, so tragically taken away at the age of twenty-four, a new mother, a young nurse. How she lived to help others, how she loved music, how she had been so looking forward to becoming a mother. How she had been married in this very church, only a year earlier. Some words about Alex, but Raoul couldn’t hear them with the buzzing in his ears, that old deafness acting up on his left side, and then the priest was saying to pray for baby Christine, still in hospital, small and premature, and the sweat was beading cold on Raoul’s skin, and he would have left then, would have stepped outside to get some air and not to intrude on these other people’s grief when his own grief was enough to knock the air from his lungs, would have left if he did not feel a slim hand slide into his, and squeeze his fingers.

He blinked his eyes open, his vision sticky and half-blurred from the tears, and looked down at Christine, Christine come back into the past, from forty years in the future, to see her mother’s funeral.

He squeezed her hand back, and she leaned into him, and he knew, then, that he would stay, knew that this must be why he had seen the notice in the paper, time’s reason for it, that he would be there in time for her.

* * *

He hated being there, hated being a part of this thing that had no place for him, but for her sake, Christine, he’d do it again if he had to.

* * *

He wrapped his arm around her waist, and drew her close.

* * *

He’s always hated funerals.

* * *

There was the shaking of the hands, after everything was finished, and Christine slipped outside, whispering that it would be too weird for her, but he joined the queue, and in that slow procession to the top of the church, he thought of many things, but mostly he thought how strange it was, that the first time they met each other in any way was at Philippe’s funeral all those years ago, and he didn’t know who this blonde girl was (how could he have?) who looked as devastated as he felt, but he’s always remembered the feel of her hand in his.

That their positions were so very close to reversed…

(The thought of her as a newborn baby sick in hospital frightened him then even knowing that she would live and grow up and be well, and it unsteadies him now to remember it.)

* * *

Alexander Daaé, this young man of twenty-three, grief-stricken and pale, gaunt, looking as if he hadn’t slept in a week, his eyes so blue, rimmed red from his tears.

He nodded dumbly, and swallowed, as Raoul shook his hand, and whispered that he was sorry, and he wished he could say so much more, but words failed him there, and he swallowed, and shook the hands of the other two people who were beside Alex, the man and woman who had done the readings (the two Valeriuses), and then he walked outside to sign his name in the book, and to find Christine.

Not for the first time that week, he ached for a cigarette.

Ached for a whole box of them.

* * *

Had Sorelli known? Known that within days of being born Christine would be motherless?

Surely she couldn’t have. Surely, if she had, she would have mentioned it.

* * *

Christine wanted to join the procession to the graveyard, so they did. Out of place he might have felt, but she shouldn’t have had to be alone and anonymous in that crowd when it was her own mother, when she had more right to be there than most of them.

He never had the chance to go to his mother’s funeral, has never had any memory of his father’s. That she could be at her mother’s—

Leaving her alone would be wrong, just wrong.

* * *

(When everyone was gone, he hugged her close, and her tears were damp soaking into his shirt, but he wouldn’t let her go for the world.)

* * *

They went for a long walk, neither saying anything, and every so often she would squeeze his fingers, as if to remind herself that he was still there, and he would squeeze hers back, a silent affirmation of, _I’m not leaving you_.

He never felt so old, until that day, under the weight of their griefs, different and intertwined. Sorelli, eight days dead (so long, so short), Sylvia, five days dead (a woman never known by either of them, really, but how she marked their lives). He wondered what she was like, wondered how much of her is in Christine, wondered what she would think of the amazing woman her daughter grew into.

He wished he could meet her, just to talk to her, just once.

* * *

(“You didn’t have to stay with me,” Christine’s voice soft, the evening closing in.

“I wouldn’t be anywhere else,” he whispered, and smiled.)

* * *

Eventually they made it home, and he made tea. Neither of them had any appetite to eat (he hadn’t eaten much of anything at all since Sorelli died, not able to stomach the thought of it), but he made sandwiches anyway for them to pick at, and her smile was faint.

“You’re too good to me,” she whispered, “you’ve always been.”

He shook his head, and covered her hand with his. “Never.”

She swallowed. “Do you still have that chartreuse? That you bought for—when you were going to see Sorelli?”

The chartreuse. He’d given the cake to Harry, because he couldn’t stand to look at it, but he still had the chartreuse, and with everything that had happened he’d almost forgotten about it.

“I do.”

“Can we—I want to drink a toast.”

“Anything you want.”

He got up, and found the bottle, and set down two shot glasses on the table. She opened it, and filled them with a steady hand.

* * *

Six toasts, drunk in half-measures, to keep it from going to their heads, the chartreuse biting their throats.

The first to Sorelli, and the second to Sylvia. The two lives gone for the world.

The third to Alex, and the tears were damp in Christine’s eyes.

The fourth to the Valeriuses. (“They were like grandparents to me,” she whispered. “Fabian died when I was five, but Anea—Anea only died a few years ago. They took in my father, after his parents were killed in a crash.”)

The fifth to her, and a tear trickled down her cheek as he proposed it. (“The most remarkable woman,” he whispered.)

The sixth to him, and he swallowed against the lump in his throat as she smiled. (“My dearest friend.”)

* * *

(“She was weakened from tuberculosis,” he breathed. “She had recovered, but in those days recovery was often only temporary, and having me was just too much and she—she died the next day. It was Philippe that had to organise the funeral. Our father, he—he just couldn’t get his head around it.”)

* * *

(“It was an embolism,” she whispered. “Stopped her heart during the labour and they had to deliver me by a section. When they—when they got it started again, her brain was too damaged.” She swallowed, and he brushed the tears from her cheeks. “I’ve always wondered, if I had been normal, if she would have lived.”)

* * *

(Both of them, that night, remembering, and they held each other in the darkness.)


	31. 31

If he had the strength, he would get Erik to drive him down to that graveyard in Wicklow, just to visit Sorelli one last time. But he knows that if he did then by the time they got there he’d be too stiff to get out of the car, and what would be the point?

So he doesn’t ask, doesn’t even mention it though he knows Erik has been in his own right, but on the eve of Philippe’s seventy-eighth anniversary, he raises a glass to her and her memory, watches the firelight flicker over her framed photograph, and that will have to do.

“There’s not a day goes by that I don’t miss you,” he whispers, “but it won’t be long now, I promise.”

* * *

Christine stayed several days, after her mother’s funeral. They went for a few walks, visited the respective new graves, and she was there as he buried the lock of Sorelli’s hair at the stone bearing Philippe’s name, took the old violin he’s always kept for her and played it (a ceremony of their own making, and he thinks Sorelli would have liked it), but mostly they talked. Talked of the past, and pieces of her future, and it was all that they could be for each other, someone to talk to, but it was enough.

When she left, the loneliness that settled in her place was almost more than he could stand.

* * *

If not for Harry phoning twice a week, and coming down from Belfast every Saturday of that first year, he might have gone mad. But Harry kept him on the straight and narrow, made sure he was eating and looking after himself, and he grumbled a bit because he knew that would keep Harry happy, but he appreciated it more than words could say.

Appreciated it even when he hadn’t the energy to enjoy it.

The hours were long after Harry left, the days long when he didn’t ring, and the quiet in the house was enough that his own thoughts were deafening.

Every time his phone rang, he expected to hear her voice on the other end of the line.

There were only so many times he could go for a walk before the thought of going for a walk made him want to lie down and sleep.

* * *

It was almost peaceful, the times he could forget that she was dead. But the remembering--

The remembering--

The remembering was like having a piece cut out from him every time.

* * *

Why would Christine come back in time now, without Sorelli to draw her?

What could this past hold for her, when she had Erik in her present?

What did he have left, except memories and graves?

* * *

He would have gone back to Trinity, but he’d been replaced by a young lady lecturer, and it would be wrong of him to insist on his returning and replacing her, however appealing working himself into another (possibly fatal) heart attack might sound.

He passed his two remaining PhD students onto that girl, and wished her well.

It wouldn’t have been right to keep working with them, when he couldn’t give their work proper attention, when the very thought of it made him want to close his eyes to the world.

Besides, he was too old to go looking for a position anywhere else.

* * *

Noël’s documentary on Connemara was on at the end of May, and as soon as he heard when it would be he reached for the phone to call Sorelli and invite her to join him so they could watch it together.

Then he remembered she was dead, and it was all he could do to breathe.

* * *

How could Sorelli be dead?

How could she have just died like that? So quietly, so quickly?

* * *

He woke up one morning at three a.m., and he couldn’t remember what he’d dreamt but there were tears damp on his cheeks.

He didn’t sleep again that night.

* * *

“I think you should come stay with us in Belfast for a while.” Harry’s mouth was a thin line, his brow furrowed. “Even just for a few days.”

Raoul plastered on a smile and shook his head. “I’m fine, really. Just tired.”

* * *

What he wouldn’t give just to see her sneer about something ridiculous in the newspaper, one more time. Just to see her throw it aside, and insist she needed to write a letter to the editor.

* * *

On a grey morning in June, he went out and bought a box of cigarettes.

She’d be furious if she thought he was smoking, but if he was on the receiving end of that fury one more time he’d treasure it just for her to hug him afterwards, for her to look him in the eye and say, “You know I’m only worried for your health”.

In the end he only smoked two out of the box. They were enough to make him want to vomit, his chest tight, and he burned the rest of the box.

* * *

He made sure to have shaved every time before Harry arrived, and to be sure the house was tidy. And he always made sure to plaster on some sort of a smile, no matter who rang, so that he wouldn’t sound too bad on the phone. It wouldn’t do for anyone to worry about him.

* * *

What pulled him out of it, for a little while, was when they decided to interview him for a documentary about Sorelli. No one else knew her as well, and he had to be at his best for her. It wouldn’t be right to be anything less.

He went out and bought a new suit, because his best suit was the one he had worn to the funerals, and he couldn’t stand to wear it anymore, and it was too loose on him anyway, with the weight he’d lost. So, he went out and bought a new suit, tailored to his thinner frame, and it disguised some of the weight loss, and made him look a good deal better.

A nice navy. The black was making him look washed out.

He didn’t get his hair trimmed, but he did comb it back, and shaved carefully to be sure he didn’t miss any stubble or nick himself, and he was a little pale, but didn’t look half bad.

And he gave a good account of her, too. Of her and Philippe, and how they would have married, and how he first knew her. About the war and her time in England as a nurse, and her return to the stage afterwards and how the stage became the screen. Anyone could tell about that, but only he could tell about how important she felt it was, to build up a profile as an actress and use that for other things, like when she joined the Post-Sanatorium League, and campaigned for Noël, and the scandal she caused when she came out against the Church during the Mother and Child Crisis, and how she carried that through all of her life, and her fury over the lack of urgency in dealing with AIDS was just the same as her fury from more than thirty years earlier.

How she was always there for him, every time he got himself into a mess.

How no man could ever have asked for a better friend and how he was always so endlessly proud of her.

They’d agreed, that if there was to be something made about her after her death, then he would be the one to reveal to the world about how she also loved women, but go into no more detail than that, and give the reason that she had not spoken about in her lifetime as being that speculation over her private life would draw too much attention away from the things that needed attention, like the marriage bar when that was still there, and AIDS and the terrible poverty and deprivation in different parts of the country, of the world, and whatever else she decided to draw attention to, in any given moment.

So he did, he spoke about it, and then led into how she gave most of her wealth away to different things, and how she never stopped being angry that homosexual acts remained a criminal offence. He did not mention himself, because that would have been to draw attention away from her, but when the documentary was screened, and the country heard that Sorelli had loved women too, it caused a minor scandal.

She would have loved it if she’d known she’d cause a scandal even after she died.

* * *

(He knows, now, that Christine hadn’t known about Sorelli loving women until after she went back to May 1945 and they had their first kiss. He hadn’t mentioned it, because he hadn’t wanted to spoil anything for her, and though she’d watched the news coverage from when Sorelli died, she’d made it a point not to read much about her, or to watch most of the interviews, because when it came to Sorelli she wanted to go into the past knowing as little as possible. So there were hundreds of things she’d left unwatched and unread, to try and have some integrity in her trips back in time, and he was happy for her that that one thing was something she could discover in her own time.)

* * *

(After the documentary was shown, after the scandal died down, his outing Sorelli to the world was a piece of her history mostly left unspoken.)

* * *

It was Darius who pulled him out of himself properly. Darius, who flew back into the country again in September, and took one look at him and said, “You need a project.”

“I’m too tired for a project.”

“You’re not tired, you’re depressed. And you’ll make yourself worse with that attitude. The things she’d say if she could see you now.”

“Darius—”

“No. I’m not listening. Come on, you’re coming out for a while.”

Before he could protest, he’d been handed his coat and his scarf, and pushed out the door.

* * *

Darius dragged him back out into the sunlight, in every way, and it didn’t ease the ache in his chest, didn’t keep him from missing Sorelli, but it helped him to breathe around it, just enough that he could get his feet under him again.

Just enough that he could feel the sun on his face.

* * *

Darius insisted on playing music, refused to let him be in the house alone, insisted he eat three times a day and shave every morning and open the windows even when it was raining.

(“You were always so particular about shaving and now is no time to stop.”)

(“You’ll suffocate if you don’t let the air in.”)

(“If you don’t eat you’ll be getting more suits tailored. I swear you’re fading away.”)

It was Darius who made him realise how lonely he’d been, and when Darius couldn’t stay any longer, when he had to go back to London in mid-October, it was easier, then, to keep going. Easy to pretend there was still someone insisting he do these things.

* * *

After Darius left, Raoul finally went down to the house in Wicklow, and put everything in order, just the way Sorelli asked him to, in her written instructions.

Everything left to him, to someday leave it to Christine. Paper and letters marked with different dates for her to receive them, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years into the future and more.

Raoul resolved, then, that no matter what he would have to live long enough to do so.

Live long enough to meet that girl in her own time, all grown up.

For Sorelli, if for no one else.


	32. 32

It was that he was lonely.

It was that since Christmas he had been missing her worse than ever, a gap in his chest that he couldn’t fill.

It was that Darius was there, and Darius had been so good to him after everything. Darius who, out of everyone left, knew him best.

It was that it was his birthday, and he had just turned seventy, and he needed to feel something good, something nice, just for one night.

( _I want to feel something nice,_ the echo of Jack’s voice across forty years, words still as soft as the night before he died.)

* * *

1993, a new year.

The first new year without Sorelli.

* * *

Strange, the things that could catch him and tear that gap inside anew.

* * *

Harry and Sheila came down for his birthday. The two of them were staying in a hotel, not wanting to impose on him, and Darius had arrived the day before from London, so all four of them went out for dinner that evening, and had a pleasant time, and shared two bottles of good red wine.

He missed Sorelli desperately, and tried not to think of missing her, and with his friends it was almost possible. The three of them were careful not to mention her, and part him wished they would, and be done with it.

They parted after dinner, Harry and Sheila going back to their hotel, he and Darius getting a taxi home, both of them just a little stumbly when they got inside again.

It was Darius who opened the fresh bottle of wine. It was him who put the record on. Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp Minor, _The Moscow Waltz_. Supposed to be a piece about grief and death, but it’s always struck him as having a touch of romance to it, as ideal music to sway to, to think to.

To _be_ to.

That was what they found themselves doing, swaying slowly to Rachmaninoff, Darius’ arms wrapped around his waist, his arms around Darius’ shoulders. How often had they danced like that, when they were still together? How often did they just hold each other, and lean in close, and feel the music in their bones?

Hundreds of nights, thousands of them, every one of them special, every one of them sacred in their own way.

Darius’ lips, so soft beneath his. Darius’ breath, warm in his mouth.

Twenty years, almost twenty years since they last kissed, and what possessed him? What made him do it, knowing how it had ended before? Knowing how it must surely end again?

Darius’ body, pressed warm against him.

(The hollowness inside, the aching to be touched, to mean something, to be something to someone.)

Darius’ hand on his chest, pushing him back.

“Raoul.” Those dark eyes, searching his. “Raoul, are you sure?”

Was he sure? Sure that he wanted to kiss Darius, even after all those years?

(Sure that he had loved him, somewhere deep inside, even after everything, even when he thought he didn’t, that he had learned not to. Sure, too, that some part of Darius felt the same.)

“I need to feel something good,” he breathed, and Darius’ thumb stroked his cheek. “Just for a night, just something good.”

A nod, a hitching breath. “All right. Just for a night.”

Just for a night.

A night.

* * *

One sweet night.

* * *

(Bed, his hip twinging but Darius was kissing him, and it was so long since he had kissed anyone, touched anyone. So long since _anything,_ and they were too old for this, too old, but Darius was touching him and he needed that touch, craved it, even if the wine kept it from coming to anything more.)

(The morning light, Darius’ fingers dark against his skin, his scars, his lips kiss-swollen. “I don’t remember these,” he whispered, and Raoul swallowed. “There was an accident,” he breathed, “after you left…”)

(The tears on Darius’ cheeks, shining silver. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry…)

* * *

Neither of them wanted to go back to how things were. Neither of them wanted to be involved again, and he had promised himself that he wouldn’t, not with anyone, not again. His life had moved on, _their_ lives had moved on, had become too different. And they could never go back, could never strip off twenty years and more, and act as if none of it had ever happened, act as if Darius had never left him.

( _It just felt like time...like time...like time..._ )

They could never go back, but they could pretend. Just for one night, just for one morning. They could hold each other, and kiss each other, and pretend.

And it was enough.

It was not getting involved, when it was just a night.

* * *

Darius went back to London, and he went back to writing about Sorelli, things the world would never see, but that he needed to get down on paper, needed to just be able to hold, in a written way.

And they would be all right, this time.

* * *

It was the first year since the war ended in 1945 that he visited Philippe’s grave alone on his anniversary.

Sorelli always made a point of taking the day off, and joining him. No matter where she was working, London or Edinburgh or Paris or Cork, she would take the day off and come home to join him, so they could go to that grave together. And sometimes maybe he would visit it alone in the morning, and sometimes she would do the same, but they always went together, too, and brought flowers to him. Never stopped missing him, across all the years. Everything always a little different, always a little marked by his absence.

But she was gone, and how could he live with himself if he didn’t visit Philippe?

So he went out and he bought some lilies, and took them to Glasnevin, and there looking down at the headstone bearing his brother’s name, he was all too keenly aware of the empty space at his side.

He was not sure what sort of an afterlife he believed in, but he was sure that there must be something.

He needed there to be something.

(Still needs there to be something, to be able to believe in _something_.)

“I know she missed you terribly,” he whispered, the tears damp on his cheeks, and he managed a smile. “And I hope you’ve found each other again. I hope you’re happy together. I hope…”

* * *

Among all the things he wrote about her that have never seen the light of day, he wrote one that did, a quiet little tribute to her, that was published on the first anniversary of the day she died.

Noël rang him from Connemara to see how he was, and Harry came down from Belfast the next day. But that day he spent alone, with his own thoughts and his own memories, and he went alone to her grave.

With everything inside of him he couldn’t think of a thing to say. He didn’t really think she’d hear him, talking to her headstone. A quiet country graveyard, but there was no sense of her being there, for all the peace of it, for all the beauty of the trees. But it was a place to go, a place where she could be, maybe, where her body lay beneath the soil so it made sense for some part of her spirit to linger in some way, and all the things that he could say were words heavy on the back of his tongue.

He settled for brushing his fingers over her name cut into the stone. _Eleanor “Sorelli” Conway_. She told him once that she thought Eleanor a plain sort of name, and that her father had called her Ellie May, because Mary was her middle name. But it was Christine that first called her Sorelli, and the shape of it felt right, so when there was no one left to call her Ellie May or even Eleanor, she took Sorelli for her name, and loved it ever since.

A little bit unusual, but she was always a little bit unusual, and it was one of the things he loved in her.

(He half-expected Christine to appear, some version of her from some day far in the future, but she never did.)

* * *

There was a wrangle that summer over decriminalizing homosexuality. The _Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Bill_ , a thing long-dreamed of, discussed in the Dáil in that last week of June. Taking the offence out of acts of love with another man, and after all the years, all the hoping and arguing and campaigning, here it was. The “abolition of the offence of buggery between persons” they called it, as if it was a vulgar thing, when it was really an expression of love, of longing, a need for pleasure.

He hardly dared to believe it would be passed, even after all the attempts, even after the 1988 European ruling that the existing law was in breach of the Convention on Human Rights.

But it was passed, and when Robinson signed it into law on 7 July, that it would not be a criminal offence any more to do such things with another man, the tears welled in his eyes.

After all the years, all the s _ecrecy—_

That Sorelli hadn’t lived to see it.

(How relieved she’d been, they’d both been, with the 1988 ruling, and how she’d hugged him and whispered that it had to be a sign of change, it had to be.)

To be able to hug her and tell her that it had happened, it had _happened—_

She’d be so happy.

His chest ached to think of it.

No way to tell her, no way she could know, but he bought a bottle of champagne, and drove down to that graveyard in Wicklow.

“They’ve finally done it,” he whispered, and uncorked it. “Finally done it.”

And he had one mouthful of the champagne, felt it fizzy and sweet in his mouth as he swallowed it, and poured the rest of the bottle over her grave.

* * *

It was two days later that Christine came. Two days later, and a younger Christine than he had seen in years, surely only in her twenties, and so _pale_.

Her eyes widened when she saw him, and the tears trickled down her cheeks, and he set his newspaper aside and frowned at her. “Christine?” He was just about to ask if she was all right, if there was anything she wanted him to get her, when those tears turned to weeping and he stood up and pulled her into his arms.

What could have happened? What terrible thing to send her back here weeping in his arms?

(Send her back to a time without Sorelli. Send her back to _him,_ not to her father, not to anyone else who might know her secret in the future, but to _him_.)

And he knew it, knew it without knowing that he knew it, with a bone deep certainty, that he would know her in the future, in her own lifetime, that he would know her and they would be friends, saw it like a vision, and that he would die and leave her.

He would die.

He had to die.

She was coming from his death.

His head spun to think of it, but he held her tighter, and stroked her hair, and waited, waited for her to breathe, waited for her trembling to stop and her tears to slow.

This dear, sweet girl.

There were tears in his own eyes too, but he fought them back. Let him face it dry-eyed. Let him not upset her by crying now.

When her trembling eased, when her tears stopped, he sat her down beside him on the couch, and squeezed her hands, and looked into her eyes so blue, so raw with grief, and braced himself for what he had to say.

“I don’t care whether you think I should know or not. Tell me about how it happens.”

And her eyes welled again, and she didn’t ask what he meant because she must have known that he knew, and she told him.

* * *

(His heart, weakened. His lungs, failing. Three days in hospital, and a date, late in the night of 21 March 2017, shortly before midnight. And she would be at his side.)

(2017. Twenty-four more years, a little less.)

(He could ask for no more than that.)

(He hugged her when she finished, and kissed her hair. “Thank you,” he whispered, “thank you.”)

(He cried in his own time, quietly, after she was gone, for the grief that he would put her through, for the length of time still left to him, for the simple fact of knowing when, but it was a relief to know, a relief.)

(A relief, too, to know that he would know her in the future, in her own time.)


	33. 33

On the day that it is seventy-eight years since Philippe’s death, he is dressed in his best, and has put on his good hat, and is sitting waiting with his cane to hand when Erik arrives to visit him.

He has never once missed visiting Philippe’s grave on his anniversary. So help him, but he’s not going to miss visiting him one last time.

It’s a dull, miserable day, threatening rain, and Erik takes one look at him and sighs. “I don’t suppose I could talk you out of wanting to go.”

“Not even for a blizzard.” And it might turn wet but it’s very far from a blizzard out there.

Another sigh. “I thought as much.” And there’s mischief in his face, a slight touch of a grin, and Raoul knows then Erik was only humouring him by trying to pretend to talk him out of it. “I’ve already bought the flowers.”

Affection flares in his heart for this boy. “You weren’t even going to try, were you?”

“Not at all.”

* * *

They leave the radio off in the car, and for the twenty-minute drive say very little at all. He knows from the cast of Erik’s mouth that Christine has gone somewhere in time, and he hopes it’s to see Sorelli, hopes it’s to after they became involved in 1945 and not to those years when they didn’t speak after Philippe’s death.

He didn’t know her then, only afterwards, but he’s known her now, in this time she came from to there, and he remembers how she wept after she got back from 1939 and Sorelli telling her that she never wanted to see her again, and how he ached to be able to tell her of the future, to tell her that they would see each other again, would be friends again, would become more than friends, but the words wouldn’t come and he knew he couldn’t tell her, knew he wasn’t supposed to, and how it killed him inside, to only be able to hold her as she wept.

So he hopes she has not gone to those terrible years, but only to the ones afterwards, the good ones, when it was all in the past.

(He can understand why Sorelli told her that. Part of him wanted to do the same, when he learned after Jack died that she had known all along that it would happen, but he couldn’t do that to her, couldn’t do that to himself.)

Erik gets the car as close to where Philippe’s buried as he can, and helps him out, and he’s stiff just after the journey, legs tired, and it would be so easy just to sit and get Erik to bring the flowers to the headstone, but it wouldn’t be the same, it wouldn’t be right, and he wouldn’t forgive himself.

He has his cane, but he leans heavy on Erik’s arm, too, and if Erik notices it, he pretends not to.

* * *

_Philippe Roderick de Chagny._

_1904-1939._

_Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam._

How many times has he read those words?

Erik sets the flowers down, and squeezes his hand, before he steps back to give him privacy, to give him space to speak, if he wants to. But Raoul is all out of words when it comes to visiting his brother’s grave, comes here, mostly, to feel close to him, and because something deep inside of him wants to, needs to, and all he can think is how the headstone would look with his name added to it.

_Raoul Algernon de Chagny._

_1923-2017._

And maybe a line from Keats to round it off. Or Marvell.

(The headstone would look very crowded, with them both on it.)

No. No, he doesn’t think he’d like it, disturbing Philippe’s rest, after all the years. The thought doesn’t sit well with him. Better to bury him somewhere else, and leave it at that.

“Won’t be long now, brother,” he whispers, and swallows. “Won’t be long.”

* * *

Twelve days.

* * *

Erik comes back, after a little while, and doesn’t say anything, just stands close beside him, ready, if he should want him.

Raoul swallows, and braces himself against the pounding of his heart. “Don’t bury me here,” he whispers, “when the time comes. Put me somewhere else.”

He feels Erik stiffen, and watches him out of the side of his eye, the firm set of his jaw. For a long minute, he thinks he might protest, might try to tell him not to think about such things, but then he draws in a shuddering breath, and nods.

“All right.”

* * *

All right.

* * *

Christine finds them there, some sense of hers drawing her to them when she comes back to the present, and she slots her arm through his, leans her head against his shoulder. “Where were you?” he whispers, his voice a little hoarse, and she squeezes his hand. “With him in 1939,” and her voice is soft in his ear.

* * *

(Philippe’s face, so cold and pale beneath his fingertips. The ridged stitches of that cut above his eye, and if he had moved the sheet down, uncovered the wounds, what would he have seen?)

* * *

The hardest thing, after Sorelli died, was learning to breathe around the new space in his chest that she had left.

It got easier, after that first year, and as 1993 drew to a close, it seemed like he might be getting better at it.

The fireworks crackled for the dawning of 1994, and he toasted her with a shot of chartreuse.

* * *

Darius joined him again the day before his birthday.

They had not spoken of the year before, of their one night of pretending, but it was as if by silent agreement that they allowed themselves one more night, one more night of kisses, one more night of lying skin-to-skin, of touching each other softly in the darkness. And this year they did not get themselves drunk on wine, and their touches were so much more, breath soft on skin, and as Darius’ fingers traced the crease of his hip, he knew this was just what he needed.

(One night to be lovers, again, the rest of the year to be friends, and maybe it was strange, maybe it was ridiculous, but it was the sweetest thing in the world, to have that night.)

* * *

12 February 1994.

What would have been Sorelli’s eightieth birthday.

It should be marked somehow, in some way. Should be celebrated, for what she had been, what she had done, and he ached to do something for her, in her memory, but what?

The answer came in the form of Christine.

Christine, from 2018. Still grieving him (and what a thought, that she had known him in those future years), and she smiled when she saw him, just a little sad.

“It’s good to see you,” and her eyes were damp, as he pulled her into his arms, and hugged her.

“And it’s always good to see you.”

* * *

They went out together for dinner, and talked of the future.

Pieces of it, nothing that would catch him off guard to know in advance, and when he told her that he knew about Erik she told him about him, and he didn’t miss the happiness in her eyes, to speak of the man who would be her husband in that distant faraway time.

“He composed a piece for the piano, for Sorelli and I. He’s tried teaching me how to play it, but my fingers keep fumbling on the keys. I’ve been adapting it for the violin.”

And that was what gave him the idea. “One of the things she left me was a violin that she’d bought for you. You used to play it—you will play it, when you go back to that time.”

(A piece of her future, given to her.)

She smiled, her eyes shining. “Would you like to hear the piece?”

“If you’d like to play it.”

* * *

And she did play it for him, and it brought tears to his eyes to hear it, but made him smile, too, to see her with her eyes closed, her face perfectly focused as she moved the bow over the strings, her body bending and swaying with the music. And beneath the melody, beneath the rising and falling notes, he could see Sorelli’s smile, could hear her laugh, could see the mischief twinkling in her dark eyes, and how that future boy, that Erik, captured her so perfectly he could not understand, only that he had, and he had done it beautifully, and when Raoul closed his eyes, he could see Sorelli and Christine together, dancing slowly in each other’s arms, beneath a streetlight, turning to the music, as real as if they were there before him, as real as if he was back there again, watching them, and wishing he had a camera, to capture the moment real forever.

Christine finished playing, and he opened his eyes, and smiled at her. “It’s beautiful,” he whispered, his voice hoarse, and then, “she’d love it.”

“I’m glad.” Her thumb was soft, brushing the tears from his cheeks. “I’m glad.”

* * *

And so the years went, ticking on. Periods of loneliness, and hollowness, and brightness in between. Darius writing, Harry visiting. Christine popping in and out, from one time and another, every few months. Going to Belfast, and Sheila insisting he was too thin and needed to eat more and Harry grinning at him across the table. That time in the newsagents in Bray, and Noël saw him first, and called him, “Raoul!” and when Raoul turned around it took him a minute to recognise him with his fishing hat, and because he wasn’t expecting to find him there, and then he grinned when he knew who it was. They went for tea, and Noël was fiery, telling him about the essay he was working on about Church influence on the education system, and it was like old times again, forty years in the past and more.

“Charlie O’Connor’s written a book about the Post-Sanatorium League,” he said then, and Raoul raised an eyebrow.

“I thought he went to South Africa for his health?” He remembered Charlie O’Connor, and his relapses with TB. Sorelli had been fond of him and admired his efficiency.

“He comes back every now and then.”

That was what gave Raoul the idea to collect some of his writings from that time into a book, and write a proper introduction about his memories of it and being sick himself, and it was published the next year, causing a minor stir.

(Christine, after he told her about Jack, and having been ill himself, tracked down the book and it satisfied him to know it’s still out there for people to find.)

“Historians will consider this valuable someday,” Noël told him when it was published in 1995. “All of us leaving our records. Just you watch.”

And as an old historian Raoul knew he was right, knew that even as he was putting them together, but it touched something deep inside, to think his old writings would be primary sources to someone, someday, would have a value of their own.

* * *

Darius came every one of those years for his birthday, and every time was special, every time made better by his being there, by not being alone, by their pretending.

Something more than friends, something different from lovers. Not a romantic relationship, in any true sense, but something of their own.

He thinks Sorelli would be pleased, to know he would not be wholly alone, pleased to know that they had found their own arrangement that worked.

* * *

Christine was always the true highlight, and whether she was from 2018 or 2048 or 2068 it was always good just to see her, to be connected to something greater than himself, to hear her perspective on things that had happened years ago for him but were new to her, and with the older Christines they talked over their memories, and with the younger ones they did that too, sometimes, though they had less memories in common, and often they talked of films and books and music instead, and he made sure the violin was looked after, for her to play, and made sure that there were always clothes for her.

* * *

They went together to see _Michael Collins_ when it was released in the Savoy in November 1996, and he spent most of the time glancing over at her, grimacing over the historical inaccuracy, and wincing at Julia Roberts’ horrendous Irish accent.

Afterwards, when Christine asked him if he’d enjoyed it with just a hint of mischief in her eyes, he scowled and said he intended to write a very long article correcting all its problems.

When she laughed, he got the impression that he’d been conned into watching something she knew he’d hate, but he couldn’t even be mad at her, not when she was so satisfied with herself.

(Besides, he had to admit that Aidan Quinn as Harry Boland was a reasonable enough reason to watch it.)

(He’s never told her that, but he might yet, just to see what she’d say.)

* * *

1997, the dawning of another year.

The bells tolled, and he toasted Sorelli’s photograph, and fiddled with the record player.

Footsteps on the stairs, a light step. Christine, and she smiled to see him, the silver shining in her hair as she took his hand.

“Happy new year,” she said, and kissed his cheek. “May I have this dance?”

He kissed her hand, and smiled. “You may indeed.”


	34. 34

May 1997.

A month that he prefers to not have to remember.

One that he is grateful that he will never have to re-live again.

* * *

Ever since, May has been the most difficult month of the year.

* * *

It was not that the whole month was terrible. The first half of it was perfectly pleasant, perfectly normal.

Somehow, looking back, that makes the second half so much worse.

* * *

The call came first thing in the morning.

16 May. He was hardly awake.

Darius.

Was it that the phone ringing woke him? Or did he sense that it was about to?

He missed the first call. The second he answered as the kettle was boiling for tea.

Morning calls are rarely a good thing. Too many things can happen in the night.

“Hello?”

Not Darius. Darius’ niece, Patricia.

“Is this Raoul de Chagny?”

And when he answered, “yes”, she told him who she was. And told him it might be best if he was sitting down.

It was then that he knew.

His heart pounding so hard he could feel it in his throat.

* * *

Darius.

Darius dead.

_Dead_.

* * *

It was all he could do to breathe.

* * *

Liver cancer.

He’d only known six weeks, known it was terminal.

“He said he couldn’t find the words to tell you.”

* * *

“There were things he wanted you to have. I’ll bring them over with me when I—when I bring him.”

* * *

“I can’t—I won’t be able to go over for the service.” The water, the cold in his bones, Philippe’s boat exploding—

And her voice was kind, understanding. “I know. He said to tell you it was all right, that he knew—knew how things were.”

And her voice caught, and he wondered how much she knew, about them, and how they had been.

* * *

Brittas Bay.

He’d wanted to be cremated, and have his ashes sprinkled at Brittas Bay. They’d gone there several times, on holidays, and Darius found watching the waves peaceful, said that it helped him to write. And Raoul liked the scenery, the dunes, liked that it wasn’t Dublin, liked that Darius was happy.

Brittas Bay, the perfect place for him.

* * *

They’d seen each other only four months earlier, for Raoul’s birthday. Darius seemed tired, but he smiled and insisted he was all right, and kissed him just the same. That he could be dead—

How could he be dead?

* * *

How long he sat there in the kitchen, after the call ended, he has no idea. Hours, as it sank into him, that spreading ache, the numbness. Those words circling in his head, _Darius dead…Darius dead…Darius_ dead…

It was almost noon, when he finally made the tea. And went to the bathroom and shaved, and combed back his hair. The water was cold on his face, so cold. Little things, done mechanically, to prepare himself.

And then he went back to the phone and rang Harry.

* * *

Harry wanted to drive down straight away to be with him, didn’t want him to be alone after hearing that news, but Raoul persuaded him not to.

“Tomorrow,” he said, his voice steadier than he felt, “come tomorrow. I just—I need to be alone today. Need to get my head around it.”

Quiet, and then, “I’ll be there right after breakfast.”

“I’ll have the kettle boiled.”

* * *

He phoned Noël in Connemara, listened to the quiet on the line after he told him, the slight breathlessness. “If there’s anything I can do—”

“I know.”

* * *

Darius was dead so why were his eyes so dry? It didn’t make sense. Why wasn’t he weeping?

Lying still on his bed, this crushing weight of it on his chest.

He closed his eyes.

* * *

The same bed, four months earlier. Darius lying half on top of him, head tucked in against his neck, skin warm beneath Raoul’s fingertips, tracing circles.

Pretending. The two of them pretending.

Shifting, Darius’ lips pressed to his, Darius’ tongue slipping into his mouth, and he sighed, and pressed closer to him.

Only four months—

* * *

How could Darius be dead?

* * *

Christine came, one of the later Christines, and when she found him she lay down beside him, and wrapped her arms around him, and held him, just held him.

“What is it?” she whispered, and he swallowed, his voice thick.

“Darius.”

Silence, and her voice. “I’m so sorry, Raoul. I’m so sorry.”

* * *

A long time later, her voice soft. “You’re better off under the covers. You’ll get cold.”

He nodded dumbly, and let her fix the sheets around him.

* * *

All he could think of was how Darius smiled at him, just a hint of sadness in the corners of his mouth, that last time. How did he not see it sooner?

* * *

She made him tea and added whiskey to it and he slept, he must have, because the next time he came back to himself it was to the grey light of early morning and Christine was gone and the phone was ringing.

She’d left a glass of water on the bedside locker and he sat up and sipped it and cleared his throat. And then he answered the phone.

“Raoul?”

He’s not sure who he was expecting, but it was not Harry’s daughter Leanne, her voice hoarse.

He was wide awake in an instant, that sick feeling twisting in the pit of his stomach again.

“What is it?”

“Something terrible has happened.”

* * *

Harry. A fall down the stairs. Surgery for a fractured skull, in intensive care. And the doctors didn’t think—

“Mum says for you to come.”

A shuddering breath. “Tell her I’m on my way.”

* * *

(If he had let Harry come when he wanted to, had not told him to wait until the next morning, would it have happened?)

* * *

He found a bag already packed. Christine had known (again) and not been able to tell him (again), and the tears prickled his eyes but he changed into fresh clothes and put the bag into the car.

The drive to Belfast was a blur. He couldn’t stand turning the radio on, so he left it off and rolled the window down to get air in and keep him from feeling faint.

* * *

He sees it again in his nightmares, Harry lying there in that bed, his eyes closed, his head bandaged, wires and tubes trailing out from under his hospital gown, another tube in his mouth, forcing air into his lungs.

(So still, lying there so still.)

His hand never stirred, as Raoul took it in his own.

He knew from Sheila’s face, knew without ever a word spoken, that this was it.

(Why? Why did it have to happen like that? So suddenly, so cruelly?)

Sheila squeezed his hand, her face pale and splotched from tears, and whispered that she was slipping outside for a few minutes.

_Say anything you want to say now,_ she meant, _there might not be another chance._

When he was the only one left in the room, he kissed Harry’s hand, and kissed his cheek, and lay his head down on the pillow beside his, to whisper in his ear.

(He hoped he could hear him, hoped some part of him could hear him.)

* * *

The quiet words he spoke that day, of old love, of twenty years of friendship. Of Jack, and that he would be waiting for him. Of being sorry for not letting him come when he wanted to. Of gratitude, for being so good him, so kind, after Sorelli.

Little words, and they could not mean enough, could not be enough, but they were all that he could say around the lump tight in his throat. And then he fell silent, and watched the slow rise and fall of Harry’s chest from the machine keeping him alive.

That he would be so quiet, so still—

His hand was so cold.

* * *

Behind his eyes the flickers of cracks of memories. Harry’s half-smile, his face pressed into a pillow. The golden shine of the sun on his hair. The shape of him, wrapped in his black coat, watching the raindrops slip down the window.

The breath catching in Raoul’s throat.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

* * *

He found a bed and breakfast to stay in, quiet, and phoned Leanne so she would know where to find him if there was any news. It could be days, could be weeks until Harry died, but he was far too tired to drive all the way back home, couldn’t bear to go so soon after seeing him.

He lay down on the bed, and closed his eyes, and longed for the world to just be still.

* * *

Harry died that night, quietly, his heart simply ceasing to beat. (It had failed in the ambulance, Sheila had told him, her voice groggy from crying, but they restarted it and it failed again when he was in surgery, but they got to restart it again. And she had decided that the next time it should fail, then it would be kinder to let him go.)

Kinder to let him go, so that was what she did.

It was morning, 18 May, when Raoul heard the news, and it was in the shower, in the little en suite attached to his room, that the tears came. Just a few of them, and then they stopped, again, and he couldn’t know why, but he towelled his hair dry, and combed it back, and shaved, and hardly recognised his face in the mirror, like a wraith.

And then he went to see what he could do to help with the funeral.

* * *

The great swelling ache in his chest that made it so hard to breathe.

* * *

Some of the longest three days of his life. He didn’t want to intrude, but he felt so _useless,_ good for making a few phone calls (including to Noël, but he couldn’t reach him, and decided the lines might be down, always hard to know what the weather might be like in Connemara) and not much else. And there was no point driving back to Dublin when he’d only be coming up again in a few days.

So he made the phone calls, and made sure everyone was fed, kept the candles lit, and thought that if Harry had died three days earlier he’d have been ringing Darius in England to tell him and learned then that Darius, too, was dying.

What are the odds, that his two dear friends and ex-lovers would die within three days of each other?

It sounded so ridiculous he might laugh but then he’d start crying and not be able to stop, and he had to hold himself together until after the funeral. It wouldn’t do to crack up before that.

* * *

Sheila asked him to be one of the pallbearers. What else could he do but accept?

* * *

They buried Harry on 21 May 1997, in Milltown Cemetery in Belfast.

The last time Raoul was in a church for a funeral it was Sylvia Daaé five years earlier. That was bad enough, but this time he was even more lightheaded, something niggling in the back of his consciousness that he pushed away. This day was for Harry, and Harry’s memory, and he couldn’t let himself think about Darius or Jack or Sylvia Daaé or anyone else.

He watched as John and Leanne did the readings, listened as the priest went on and on, and all he could think was if that man knew what he and Harry had been to each other once upon a time then he wouldn’t be saying these nice things about Harry at all.

* * *

What he’s always remembered best has been the kindness of Harry after Jack died, when they didn’t really know each other at all. But Harry came to see him, to tell him where he was taking his body, and sent Sorelli the clipped-out death notice for him for when he was well. Such simple things, but they meant the world after, when the time came that he wanted to find the grave. And then Harry coming to meet him the day after Jack’s first anniversary, to see how he was more than anything else.

In hindsight, that’s when he fell in love with him, right there, before they ever got involved with each other.

* * *

He closed his eyes as the priest read the Gospel, that same one about Lazarus again, and could see Harry and Jack, laughing in that room in the sanatorium, and fiddling with the camera.

Just as they had been, all those years ago.

(Forty-five years. Forty-five _years_.)

* * *

After the funeral, after the refreshments, after Sheila hugged him and thanked him for all his help and it was all he could do not to weep there into her hair, he went back to the B&B, and resolved to try and sleep.

It was getting late, the evening coming on, and he pulled the curtains and lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. He’d bought a bottle of whiskey, and if sleep wasn’t willing to come, he could drink enough of that to force it, if he wanted to.

(The tears he’d been fighting earlier didn’t want to come either, but he knew they would in time.)

Mostly, he was too tired to feel much of anything.

And he did sleep, for a little while, until he felt a disturbance in the air, something that told him he should open his eyes.

So he did, and in the dim light coming through the curtains, the night deep in the shadows of the room, he saw Christine, sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing his big coat.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” she whispered, her face creased, and he shook his head as he pushed himself up to sit.

It only struck him then he was still wearing his funeral clothes, and he felt as if he was burning up in them but he didn’t have the energy to change into something else.

“It’s fine.” And he was groggy from having just woken, that hollowness of everything aching inside, but he smiled for her anyway, so she wouldn’t worry about him. “It wasn’t too good of sleep.”

“Where are we?”

“Belfast,” and when he said it she frowned, and he swallowed hard against that new lump in his throat. “Harry’s funeral.”

She reached for his hand and squeezed it. “I’m sorry. What date is it?”

“21 May 1997. Close to the 22nd, now.” Even in the darkness of the room he could see the look that crossed her face. Something caught in his heart, and he felt the sweat cold on his skin but he had to ask the first question that came into his head because that look could hardly mean anything else. “Who’s dead now?”

To his own ears, it sounded exhausted.

She looked away, and squeezed his hand again, and then looked back, and in the dim light he could see the tears shining on her cheeks.

“Noël.”

* * *

Noël.

* * *

He came back to Christine shaking him, the light turned on, her face creased with concern. And she opened her mouth to say something but before she could he could only ask,

“How?”

She swallowed, her eyes damp. “Pneumonia.”

* * *

Her fingertips gentle wiping the tears from his eyes.

* * *

He didn’t sleep a wink after that.

* * *

He heard, once, about deaths coming in threes, but he never believed it, not until then.

* * *

He doesn’t remember the journey to Connemara, but he remembers the radio talking about Noël and all he had been. He remembers being there, in Connemara, but he doesn’t remember what anyone said to him. He remembers hearing Auden read at the funeral, remembers hearing the flute played, remembers feeling as if he was swaying, as if he was about to fall, even when he was standing perfectly steady.

He remembers how the numb heaviness in his chest, that started when he got the phone call about Darius and weighed heavier as he sat with Harry, how it had spread all through him, so that he couldn’t even feel his fingertips.

He remembers remembering Christine talking to him, before he left Belfast, as they lay on that bed in the room he’d taken, in that long night, her telling him things to distract him, to give him something else to think about so he could breathe, and how she said that day, 22 May, because it had passed midnight by then, how that was the day that her tiny five-year-old self was going to travel into the past for the first time.

Another time he might have asked her more about it, but all he could think then, and the next day as he stood beside another open grave, was how was it all supposed to fit together? How was any of it supposed to fit together?

His three closest remaining friends, all dead within a week, and tiny Christine skipping through time. How was any of it real at all?

* * *

How he made it to Sorelli’s grave in Wicklow without crashing and killing himself he will never understand. But what he remembers is his knees buckling beneath him, as he looked down at her name, and the realisation hitting him that he was the only one left. Him, out of all that they had been.

Just him.

“They’re all gone,” he whispered, and it was then that the tears came, then. “All gone.”

* * *

(Christine found him, and held him, and put him into a taxi and took him home. She helped him to bed, and when he lay down in his own room for the first time in a week that felt like the longest of his life, he wished he would never have to leave it again. Wished he could just stop, there, and be done.)

(How could they all be dead?)


	35. 35

Christine came, and stayed six months.

He’s not sure he would have survived that year without her.

(Mostly, she just let him talk, about anything, even things that had not yet happened to her, and to give these memories words made it easier to breathe, to know that they were shared with someone, and not just bound up in him.)

* * *

(She came back from—he’s not sure when, 2060 maybe, and was only gone a week in her own time, he learned after.)

* * *

She was there through it, right at his side, as he and Patricia threw Darius’ ashes into the wind of Brittas Bay, and she played ‘Mo Ghile Mear’ as an instrumental on her violin as the breeze carried the last of him away. And afterwards, when he couldn’t sleep, she lay down beside him and wrapped her arms around him and didn’t say a word.

When they came to him asking him to be part of a documentary about Noël, and he almost said no because he didn’t think he could stand it, she was the one that gently persuaded him to say yes, instead, and he has never regretted it.

(And she didn’t mind, when he didn’t speak for a day afterwards, the heaviness in his chest too much for words.)

(How many times has he been in documentaries about the dead that have marked his life?)

When it became known that he was the RdC that Darius had dedicated his earliest books to, and his later ones, they came to ask him to talk about him. And through the ache in his chest, the terrible tightness in his throat, he found words to talk about him, too, and all that he was, words that kept their secret just out of view, but there, for anyone who wished to look closely enough.

He seemed to spend most of his time, that summer, writing and recording tributes to dead friends. And Harry was there in the middle, his death overshadowed by Darius and Noël, his life not as known, and there would not be documentaries made about him, would only be a few small things written by other photographers, for their journals and newsletters out of the public eye, but Raoul sat down and wrote about him just the same, and how he had been defiant and wonderful in his own way and one of his dearest friends, and had that published, too.

Let his death not go unnoticed by the world.

(Sorelli was in the habit of collecting every piece he wrote, and she kept them in scrapbooks. And after she died, he kept the scrapbooks going, because she would have liked him to, but he has a special scrapbook for all these pieces he’s written, to mark dear lives gone from the world.)

(He knows Christine will write about him after he’s gone, will write the piece that will memorialise him in _History Ireland_ and maybe in other journals too, and one of the things he’s requested is for her to add it to that scrapbook, beside all the others. All of them, united between its pages.)

* * *

Christine was there, too, when he sorted through the things Patricia had brought him, that Darius had wanted him to have. Books, and diaries, and letters, and old gifts, and photographs, mementoes from when they had been together, mementoes from when they had been friends, and something in between. A heavily annotated copy of the book he had written about Casement, twenty years before, that Darius was using as research for his next novel, before he died. She was the one that helped him find places for it all, and when the tears came, she quietly made him tea, and brought him tissues.

She slipped into the garden, when he opened the letter Darius had written him, but he couldn’t read it, that night, because that writing so familiar blurred with the tears.

The next morning he read it, instead, in the grey light of dawn, and he has hardly touched it again, in all the years since, but the words are engraved on his heart.

_I hate telling you like this…don’t think I could have borne doing it in person…you know I would never ask you to cross the sea and if I had rang to tell you or sent a letter then you would have felt compelled to and I couldn’t put you through that…I hope you can forgive me for not telling you sooner…_

_…always regretted the way it ended before…it was only after that I realised what a stupid fool I’d been but I didn’t think you’d want me back and I wouldn’t have blamed you…I still don’t blame you…_ None of it was your fault, Raoul, I need you to believe that… _I’ve always loved you even without you and I made a terrible job of showing it…you’re the most special man I’ve ever known…_

_…don’t let this weigh on you, please don’t…_

_…I never deserved the love of someone like you…_

_…I don’t want this to mark your life…_

_…You know I’ve never known what I believe in, but if there is something more, then take your time getting there…_

_…I love you…_

_…I’m sorry._

* * *

Three toasts, that night. More chartreuse. To Darius, to Harry, and to Noël.

* * *

He tried to write his own letter, back, knowing Darius could never read it but needing to write it just the same. But all it came to was, _why? Why if you loved me why? Why didn’t you tell me you should have told me could have told me we’d have found a way if I could just hear your voice again why didn’t you tell me I wish you’d told me_

Ink scrawled across paper, and he tucked it away and never looked at it again.

* * *

He went alone to visit Jack’s grave.

Christine offered to go with him, if he wanted her to, but he told her that he needed to do it alone.

He brought only a canvas chair, and a bottle of red wine.

It was the first time, in years, that he spoke to Jack, but he set up the chair beside his headstone, and uncorked the bottle.

And he told him, told him about these three deaths. Told him too, properly, about Sorelli. Told him about Harry, and what they had been to each other.

(“…he married a lovely woman called Sheila and they had a family. Named their son after you, I’m sure he told you that…”)

(“…you remember Noël, of course, though you always called him Doctor Browne, he’s gone too now…”)

(“…and you never met Darius but I think I told you about him. You would have liked him, he…”)

The sun was just setting, the cold breeze coming in off the ocean, when his voice failed him, hoarse from all the talking. He took just a sip of the wine, to ease the ache from his throat, and poured the bottle into the grass.

* * *

It’s always been strange, since, visiting Jack, knowing he’s the only one left, the only one who remembers him, and knows that he _was_.

* * *

It was late November when Christine went, back to that time far in the future. The quiet in the house when she was gone was almost unbearable, but not as terrible as it would have been if she had never come.

* * *

He went to Dublin Castle to watch the fireworks, the coming of 1998. One of the only times he ever did, and he might have celebrated it, in his usual quiet way, but after the year that 1997 had been it felt important to see the new one in a little differently.

He knew it had to be better than the one just gone, because there was no possible way that it could be worse.

* * *

And it was better. It was a good deal better, though even he will admit the bar was set low.

* * *

Sheila came to see him for his birthday, 6 January. He had been up to Belfast to see her once since the funeral, and felt guilty that he had not gone more, and he told her as much, as he made her tea, but she shook her head.

“Don’t,” she whispered, and her voice was soft. “You’ve had as difficult as time as I have, after Darius.”

Hearing her say his name so easily caught him off guard, so much so that his hand shook as he poured the tea, and it scalded his fingers as it splashed. He yelped and shook his hand, and she was on her feet in an instant, pulling him to the sink, and forcing his hand under the cold water tap.

The burning ebbed away, as she held his hand there, and tears prickled his eyes, ridiculous useless tears, and he didn’t want her to see them so he blinked hard and looked out the window and willed them to go away, but they just came harder.

Her fingers were firm, gentle curled around his wrist, keeping his hand steady.

“I know what you were to each other,” she whispered, “you and Harry. I know some part of him loved you still and I think you felt the same, and that’s what I came to tell you, that it’s okay. I don’t mind. I’ve never minded, and you need to grieve him in your own way. I understand.”

As he gaped at her, hardly daring to breathe, she turned the tap back off, and wrapped a cloth around his hand. “Now sit down,” and her voice was still so soft, “and let me make you tea. Where do you keep the biscuits?”

* * *

It was as if he had been absolved of something he had not remembered committing, a tiny easing of the ache in his heart.

As if he had been given permission, to feel the way he did.

* * *

Sheila rang him regularly after that, once a week, like Harry. And it was always a relief, to hear her voice at the other end of the line.

* * *

The spring passed easily, and Christine came and stayed with him through the month of May, through all those first anniversaries, and it was not easy but it was bearable. Better than it could have been.

They made a trip to Brittas at the end of the month, and sat on the grassy dunes looking out over the sea, and the violin she played was all he could hear.

* * *

Alex Daaé came to see him on the second of June.

Not Alex from the future, come backwards, like he was so used to. The Alex of linear time, that he had last seen newly-widowed at his own wife’s funeral more than six years earlier.

Raoul swallowed and invited him in, offered him tea which he accepted, but he seemed awkward, fidgeting with his hands. Raoul set the tea down in front of him, and some resolve crossed his face as he nodded to himself.

“Professor—”

“Raoul. Call me Raoul.”

“Raoul,” he swallowed and sat a little straighter, his blue eyes piercing meeting Raoul’s gaze. “I just got back from 1947. I don’t know if you remember—”

The impression of a memory, a warm summer’s evening, Sorelli laughing and Christine shooing them out of the kitchen before her younger (youngest) self appeared, gone back in time for the very first time.

“May. May 1947. We were discussing Parnell while Christine—”

Alex nodded. “While she was meeting herself in Sorelli Conway’s kitchen. I’ve just got back from there.”

Raoul pushed the biscuits over to him. “Tell me about it again.”

And Alex did.

* * *

(“All those times I sat in front of you in class and you never—” “I didn’t think you’d appreciate learning your own future from your lecturer.” “No wonder you never passed any remarks when I was late.” “I had the hardest time not telling you to stop making ridiculous excuses.”)


	36. 36

Alex became a regular caller, after that.

Once a month, he’d stop by for a chat, usually when Christine was in school but sometimes when she had gone travelling. Raoul found the thought of a six-year-old Christine travelling through time mildly terrifying, but Alex just shrugged.

“I was the same at her age. And it’s not as if I can do anything to stop it.” And then he sighed. “Still, I’ll rest easier when she’s home again.”

Those times, they mostly talked of Sorelli.

(“I wish I could know her, especially with how important she’ll be—she was—she is to Christine.” “You’ll get to know her well in time.”)

Alex was almost as lonely as he was, even with Christine, and Anea Valerius. Raoul could see that, that sadness in him, and he wished he could do more to help him, but talking would have to be enough, and he always enjoyed their talks. Both of them did.

They talked of Sorelli, and they talked of Sylvia, and they talked of Christine too, of course, but Raoul was always careful not to give anything away about her future.

Often, they talked of history. And that was safe ground for both of them.

Alex had never gotten to do his PhD. Everything had happened, with Christine’s birth and Sylvia’s death, there wasn’t time for it, and Raoul could understand but he hated the waste of potential when Alex had been one of the best students he’d ever known. And it was late in 1998 when they were talking about it, and Alex said,

“I’ve always been interested in the repeal of the External Relations Act.”

And Raoul thought of Noël, and the debate thirty years later over what had and had not been known to the Cabinet, thought of all the articles he himself had written at the time, and smiled. “If you wanted to apply to Trinity, I can help you with that.”

So Alex did.

* * *

He couldn’t be Alex’s supervisor, having retired, but he could write him references and help him get funding and then, after his acceptance, help him along in the background with research.

It was nice to have a project again.

And Alex introduced him to Anea, and suddenly he didn’t feel so lonely anymore.

(Fabian Valerius, as it happened, had died a year and a half earlier, another name chalked up to 1997.)

Alex offered to introduce him to Christine, but he didn’t want to meet her, not yet.

(“I don’t want it to be strange for her,” he said, “whenever it happens that she meets me in the past.” _I don’t want it to be too strange for myself_ , he meant, _meeting her when she’s six when yesterday she was sixty._ It didn’t feel right to him, somehow, and he thinks Alex understood.)

So Alex promised to keep quiet about him, and he was relieved.

* * *

1998 rolled into 1999, and they were making a documentary series about Ireland in its first seventy years of independence, so they wanted to interview him, because he was a historian, and he had lived through it.

So he talked about Philippe, and how Philippe had helped to hide guns during the war of independence though he was only seventeen. And it was sixty years since Philippe had died, and he had never stopped missing his brother, and they included a segment on his murder, so he talked about that too. They were interested in the theatre, and in censorship and films, so he talked about Sorelli, and about Darius and how some of his books had been condemned. His memories of World War II, and his memories of Noël as Minister, and his experience of tuberculosis. All these big important things he could talk about, elections and governments and the violence in the North, and how society had changed, how the world had changed from how it was in his younger years.

They called it _Seven Ages,_ and had it ready for the year 2000.

(He watched it again, a couple of years ago, with Christine, all seven episodes in two days, and he cringed a bit to see himself on television, but she didn’t seem to notice, and she enjoyed all the old footage they’d found for it.)

(He enjoyed it too, seeing these things again. Like a little window through time.)

* * *

He was interviewed, too, for a book on Noël, and several on Casement. And most of the things he could have said about Noël he thought it best to leave out, for one reason or another, but he said all he could about Casement, and found the old notes on his diaries in Sorelli’s handwriting, and something ached within him to be reminded of how she had gone to see them in his place, and how happy she had been to bring the information back to him, and he was pleased to think that the work she had once done could be a help to someone else, now, too.

* * *

Sheila came twice to see him that year, and both times insisted that he needed to eat more, so they went out to dinner together and enjoyed it, and it amused him to think that any onlooker would think they were simply an elderly couple out for an evening, and never realise that they were friends, who were mourning a man they had both loved.

It was nice, to share his memories of Harry with her.

Wonderful, too, to hear her memories of him, in turn.

* * *

He saw in the Millennium in the quiet of his own sitting room, with just the clock, and the record player, and the Millennium candles for company.

It was the best way he could spend it, and he wouldn’t change a thing.

* * *

Christine came to see him on his birthday, from 2019.

It caught him off-guard to see her so young. The more time went by, the less he was used to seeing her in her youth, more and more accustomed to the older versions of her that visited, and they didn’t cause the same ache in his heart. But the appearance of young Christines, that young Christine there in front of him, brought so many memories with her, of when they had all been young, and well, and _alive_ , of when they had been happy together, and if he squinted just a little he could almost see Sorelli beside her, grinning with mischief.

His throat was tight, and if his smile looked as forced as it felt, then she didn’t say.

(He invited her in, and made her tea, and when she heard what date it was she hugged him and wished him a happy birthday, and he smiled to hide the tears prickling in his eyes and whispered that it was happy now with her here, and she played the violin for him but mostly they talked, and it pleased him to hear she was doing post-doc work in Trinity (“they’ve given me your old office” and something soft caught in his heart) and he asked after Erik, as he had gotten into the habit of doing, because it was nice to hear of her being happy in the future and he liked the man even having not met him, and she told him she’d finally persuaded Erik to record some of his music, and Raoul hoped it would go well for him.)

He didn’t have a cake, because what was the point in buying a birthday cake just for himself when there was no one to share it with? But she kissed his forehead as he sat in his armchair and told him she’d be back before long, and went out, and when she came back she had a small chocolate Swiss roll, and some candles, and he didn’t have the heart to tell her it made him feel foolish, but she put seven candles in the cake, and lit them, and insisted he blow them out, and when she grinned at him it cheered something deep inside, that he hadn’t known needed cheering.

* * *

An hour later she was gone, and he still had most of a Swiss roll, but he didn’t mind, and he felt better, looking at it, for having had her there, for however short a time.

* * *

Mostly, the years were unremarkable.

Sometimes students would come to him to ask him questions about things he had researched, but mostly his visitors were Alex and Anea, every now and then, and Sheila the odd time, and different Christines come to see him.

Mostly he was alone, but he had his garden, and he still had access to the university library, so he kept himself up-to-date with historical research, just out of interest. To keep his mind occupied, so that he was not always dwelling on his own past. Helping Alex with his thesis worked well enough as a distraction, and the feeling of pride that swelled in his chest every time he saw the progress that he was making made him smile.

He considered, briefly, getting himself a dog, but he wouldn’t know the first thing about one, and it sounded like too much hassle.

The weekly phone calls from Sheila kept him tethered, and he enjoyed hearing all about John and Leanne and their own families.

(Harry would have been very proud.)

* * *

2001 brought the horrendous foot and mouth outbreak in the UK, and for weeks he decided it best not to watch the news. The images of burning piles of cattle and sheep carcasses made him feel ill, and then when it came to the North, and came to Louth, it was more than he wanted to think about.

They cancelled the St Patrick’s Day celebrations. If he were superstitious, he might have thought it a sign of the end times.

(Christine from 2020 visited him in those days, and when he told her about all the cancellations, she shivered and said, “they’ve done the same now with the pandemic.”)

(He was grateful, in an odd sort of way, that he would not be alive for this pandemic. It sounded altogether too frightening.)

* * *

Later in the year, he watched as the planes crashed into the Twin Towers, and it reminded him of the day Kennedy was shot, and how Darius had found him in his library to tell him the news, and his thoughts were of Philippe, going out on the water on an unassuming day, and getting blown up.

(How many people went to work that eleventh of September, and never got the chance to say goodbye?)

He remembered how he and Darius had danced in front of the fire all those years ago, because they had to dance, had to feel alive, and how Sorelli and Christine danced under the streetlights in Edinburgh, and then he turned the television off, and got himself a drink.

(The terrible things that people do to each other, and all in the name of what? For what? All this needless death—Why?)

* * *

2002, and there was a series in the Savoy where they showed an old film of Sorelli’s every Friday night for eight weeks.

He went to each of them, and it was the highlight of his week.

(Ten years since she had died, and it still felt as if she might just walk in the door when he was least expecting.)

* * *

He turned eighty on 6 January 2003 and Alex brought him a cake that Anea had baked, and Sheila phoned to wish him well, and Christine came to see him from 2035, and it was only that evening, when things had quietened down and he was alone again, that he started laughing to think of how ridiculous it was that he had lived to see eighty (how ridiculous it was that he would live fourteen more years) and the laughing turned to crying, but there was no one there to see him, and he didn’t care.

* * *

Alex finished up his thesis that year, and submitted it for review, and after he passed his viva and could officially be called _Doctor_ Alexander Daaé, he came straight to see Raoul, and he was laughing with the sheer happiness of the moment, and Raoul was laughing with him, pouring champagne to celebrate the occasion because he had never doubted that he could do it and had the bottle already bought to be ready, when a peculiar look crossed Alex’s face, and he gasped, and was gone in an instant, a heap of clothes left on the floor.

Raoul gathered them up, his back cracking from stooping, and left them folded neat on the chair.

Whether Alex had gone forwards or backwards that time, he never knew, but he hoped only that he had gone to sometime happy.

* * *

23 January 2004.

What should have been Philippe’s one hundredth birthday.

Oh, he knew it was foolish to think of his brother living to be a hundred years old, foolish to ever consider that he could have, but the day stood as itself, that date, the day he would have been a hundred, the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, and there was nothing that Raoul could do that would mark it properly, rightly.

So he sat down, and he wrote Philippe a long letter telling him everything, all sorts of things, and drank a toast to his memory, and burned the letter.

And then he drove to Glasnevin, never mind he had a shot of whiskey in him and an aching hip, and leaning heavy on his cane, wrapped up in his heavy coat, he hobbled in to see his grave.

There, plain as day, 1904 carved into the weathered headstone.

(Their parents must have been so happy, that day, so proud, so full of hope, never knowing, never dreaming, how it would all end.)

“Happy birthday,” he said, softly, and the drizzle was damp on his cheeks.

* * *

A hundred years.

Such an unfathomably long time.

* * *

He used to wonder how things would have been if Sorelli had never developed tuberculosis and she and Philippe had married in their own time. He thinks Philippe would have lived, though he can’t explain why, and the thought of that alternative life missed out on made his heart twist so much he decided it best not to think of it.

He thought instead, sometimes, of how things might have been if Sorelli had never become an actress. Likely she would have called herself Eleanor to the end of her days and married some nice young farmer and had ten or twelve children and been happy, but he can never imagine Sorelli living that sort of life, not when she was so full of adventure, so full of fire, so he stopped thinking of that unlikely possibility, too.

Better, that way, not to wonder on such things.

* * *

It was in 2006 that Sheila first got sick, and the news was a blow that drove the air from his lungs.

Breast cancer, found too late and it had spread, and they estimated that she only had a handful of months left to live.

He found out when she called him to come to Belfast, so he drove up, though the long journey made his bones ache, and she told him over tea, very quietly, and calmly, and he was the one that cried, and hugged her.

“If there’s anything you need…” he whispered, and her smile was sad, and soft.

“I know.”

* * *

She lasted longer than anyone expected, into 2007, dying a week before Harry’s tenth anniversary, and he got the train to Belfast for her funeral, instead of driving. It was easier, when he didn’t want to have to focus on anything.

Mostly he thought of her, and of Harry, and how they had loved each other, and how he would miss her terribly.

His hip wouldn’t let him carry the coffin, and when John asked him if he would, he had to politely decline. He read Auden, instead, because Leanne asked him to, Sheila’s own wish, read it as they lowered her down, and changed all the _he_ s in it to _she_ s, and it was then that he decided he would have Auden read at his own funeral, too.

Christine had never told him the details of it, but he knew she would be the one to do it.

* * *

When Alex came to see him, on 2 May 2008, he did not know it would be the last time he visited in linear time. Alex didn’t say a thing, and he knows, now, it was because he had not wanted to worry him, but he wished he would have, so he could tell him, properly, how much his friendship had meant, how much _he_ had meant.

Instead they listened to Mary Black, and drank tea, and talked about Alex’s current research, into De Valera’s leadership during World War II, and that speech he made rebuking Churchill when it was almost over. How clearly Raoul could remember hearing it for the first time, can remember it still, the crackling voice over the radio, the drizzling rain outside.

He thinks, looking back, knowing what he does, that Alex had wanted to pretend, for a little while, that his life wasn’t ending.

* * *

It was Anea who rang him with the news three days later.

Alex, dead. A brain haemorrhage. Just collapsed. She was going to the school to tell Christine and pick her up, and it was all he could do to gasp around the sudden pain in his chest, and whisper that he was sorry.

Alex, dead. How could it be?

Christine, sixteen and alone like he had been, once upon a time.

That poor girl.

(If he could take it upon himself, the pain that she was going through, if he could take Alex’s place and bring him back, he would, without a second thought.)

* * *

The first time he came face to face with Christine in linear time was at her father’s funeral.

He didn’t know when he was supposed to meet her, but he couldn’t let them bury Alex and not be there, so he went, and he joined the line of mourners going up to shake hands with her, and as he shook her hand he looked into her face, this face so much younger than he could ever remember seeing it, so pale, and she nodded as he whispered that he was sorry, and he wished he could reach out, and brush those tears from her eyes, but it was all he could do to keep his own tears at bay, and besides, she didn’t know him. How would she?

He slipped back outside, into the sunlight, and settled his hat back on, and thought how May is a horrible month.

The coming of summer, marked with the anniversaries of the dead.


	37. 37

He has written letters for Christine to have after, explaining things the best that he can. About her father and how they had been friends, because he wants her to know, he does, but every time he tries to say that to her, out loud, something catches and he can’t, like a little slip of time. He thinks she understands things like that, the little slips of time that leave things unspoken. He thinks it is why she will never warn him about Jack’s death or Darius leaving, or Sorelli’s death, or anyone’s death. The only one she could ever warn him of was his own, and he thinks, too, it is why she could never tell Sorelli that Philippe would be killed, the thing that led to their rift, and why they had that conversation he half-remembers from his fevered haze, of why she had not warned them that he was going to get so sick with his tuberculosis, that it would almost kill him too.

If he can hardly stand not being able to tell her about her father, what must it be like for her, all these things bound up within herself that she can never speak until it is too late? If it weighs on him, how much heavier must it be for her?

He tells her, in the letters, that he understands that too.

And he tells her, too, that he thinks now it is better that they could never speak these things.

Speaking them would never have been able to change them, would only have meant more knowledge to try to live with, would have coloured every moment in the worst way. And maybe if he had known Darius would die he would phoned him one last time, but would he really have been able to overcome almost sixty years of fear to cross the sea? And if he had known about Sorelli he would have been there, or tried to, but she would have worried about him knowing, worried that he would wear himself out. If he had known about Harry he would have let him drive down from Belfast that day instead of telling him to wait, but how can he know something else would not have happened instead? And if he had known about Jack—

If he had known about Jack—

If he had known about Jack, what could he have said, or done, that would have been any different?

No. Better not to know, he thinks. Better to live and act as if time is not always going around in a circle. Better, than to have every breath tainted by it.

(If he could take that burden from her, he would.)

* * *

Christine was waiting for him, when he got home from the funeral. Christine from the future, and she looked so much older than the Christine he had just seen, that he had shaken hands with not an hour and a half before.

She was sitting in the armchair that he was long accustomed to thinking of as hers, and she looked up from the newspaper she was reading, and took him in in his funeral clothes.

“What’s happened?” she asked, frowning, and he braced himself against the ache in his chest.

“Your father.”

Hardly had the words left his mouth than the colour drained from her face.

“I’m not drunk enough for this,” she whispered, and was gone in an instant, snapped out of existence.

* * *

Anea came to see him, two days later. She looked as tired as he felt, and when he made her tea, she hardly touched it.

“She’s in a terrible state,” she whispered, and he swallowed.

“I expected as much. I wish…” Wish what? That Alex was alive? Of course he wished that. That there was some way to turn back time? What he wouldn’t give. That he could go to her and tell her that she would see her father again and not have it sound like some trite sort of promise? God how he wished. That he could take her grief into himself and spare her from having to feel it? He would if he could, would without question, if there were any way.

He’s lived through so much grief he knows it like an old friend. That she should be left to deal with it was a crime.

“I wish it didn’t have to be this way,” he whispered, and the tears were damp in his eyes.

* * *

(“Can’t you meet her? Tell her anything?” “I would if I—” his throat tight, “I think,” and he was guessing, but it was an answer he could feel in his bones as if it was true, “I think she has to come to me, first.”)

* * *

“This is how it will happen,” Christine said, on a warm afternoon in June, as they sat back in chairs in his garden. She had a big hat pulled down low over her face, and they were both sipping orange squash with just a touch of vodka in it. He wished for a camera to capture the moment, but he wasn’t sure where he could get film developed anymore with everything going digital.

A pity.

He sipped his drink, and pulled his own hat lower, and listened as she told him.

* * *

26 October 2008.

The day she would come to his door. The day they would meet, properly, in linear time. Her sixteen year old self, grief-stricken and anxious, not long back from Philippe’s funeral (such a thing for her to have found herself at while in the middle of grieving her father), wondering if she was doing the right thing in coming to see him, wondering if he would even want to see her but unable to help herself, needing to see him, to feel grounded in time and space, so she came to him and didn’t know what to expect but certainly had not expected him to open his door and invite her in for tea before she ever said a word.

He closed his eyes and tried to picture the scene, the kettle boiling and him opening the door to her. Maybe he was waiting by it, ready for her knock. And would his heart be pounding, or would he be calmer than he had ever known?

A little over four months to wait, to find out.

When she left after telling him, he marked the date on the calendar.

* * *

Anea rang him regularly, that summer, to tell him about Christine, just to talk to him. She dropped by several times to see how he was, taking up where Alex had left off, and she endeared herself to him forever when she said she had always been a fan of Sorelli’s.

Anea Valerius, this woman in her fifties who had been married to Alex’s uncle who had been a good fifteen years older than her. He had not expected her to become a dear friend, but he has always been glad that she did.

So he told her, when it was that he would meet Christine, when she would come to him, so she wouldn’t worry when it happened, so she could worry less, that summer, about Christine hardly speaking, reading her way through every book she could lay hands on, not travelling, and dying her hair black.

* * *

He knew it would be twenty-five minutes past four when the knock came to his door, but when 26 October came he was up early, had shaved and combed back his hair and put on his best shirt. He could hardly sit still for the twisting in his stomach thinking that the day had finally arrived, thinking that finally, _finally_ , after sixty-three years of friendship with her, he was going to meet Christine Daaé in her own time. That girl he had first seen at Philippe’s funeral and had kissed on a New Year’s night so long ago it was almost forgotten, when he still thought he could be interested in girls, who had hopped in and out of his life so long that it had stopped surprising him when she turned up. Who had sat with him and held him as he wept the night after Jack died and had typed his thesis for him when he was recovering from his ruptured appendix and sang a song that didn’t exist when he was in hospital after his car crash. That ridiculous wonderful girl who was almost like a sister to him and who he had danced with more times than he could count before this very fire. And he was finally going to meet her in her own time. How could he ever sit still?

He was nervous too, of course, wondering what she would be like, if she would like him, wondering how much she knew of her future. Wondering what he could even say that wouldn’t spoil anything for her, so he decided to tell her about the papers Sorelli had left, that she had designated for Christine to have at different times.

And he had the chocolate digestives in stock, because he didn’t expect her taste for them to be any different.

And then the waiting started.

* * *

He was, as it happened, very close to the front door when she knocked. The kettle had just knocked off, and he had two mugs ready on the table.

He swallowed, and flexed his fingers for to ease the trembling from them, and opened the door.

* * *

His heart ached, at the first sight of her, to see how exhausted she was, how pale and small in that big coat with her violin case, and he wanted to bundle her into his arms and wrap her in blankets and keep her safe from the world, but he didn’t want to come across too forward either, and he didn’t want to worry her into thinking she had done something wrong by coming to see him, so he smiled for her to hide all his twisting inside.

“Miss Christine Daaé, impeccable timing as ever. The kettle is just boiled.” And he opened the door for to let her in.

(A ridiculous pun, really, “impeccable timing”, but he couldn’t help himself, and it caused the first flicker of something that could become a smile at the edge of her mouth, so he could never regret it.)

* * *

He quickly realised he had struck her dumb by expecting her, so he went ahead and pushed the biscuits her way and made her tea the way she always liked it, and prattled on about Sorelli and documents, and he could see the grief in her eyes, so when the tea was stirred he pushed her mug into her hands and folded her fingers around it.

“Drink it,” he said, softly, “and you’ll feel better.”

And she did.

* * *

He has told her so many times that she must think he has begun to crack, but she really has been the best of these last years of his life. There is not a thing that he would do to change the time that they have had, not a thing he would not say or do for her. He only wishes he had been able to say more, but the letters will have to do that for him.

He thinks he has made her happy, thinks he has grounded her the way she needed to be grounded. It strikes him as amusing, when he lets himself think about it, that he has been the fixed point in her life, has been there in her past and in her future and been there for her in linear time when there was no one else that could, and maybe this is why he always survived, why he outlived everyone. Maybe she was his answer to the lifetime of wondering.

She needed someone she could talk to of the past she found herself in, and time chose that someone to be him.

And he wouldn’t change that, not for anything.


	38. 38

The first thing he did the day after Christine first came to visit him was to get a taxi to take him to visit Sorelli’s grave.

He dressed in his best and brought irises for her, and when he set them down before her headstone he grinned through the tears in his eyes.

“I’ve finally met her properly,” he whispered, “she’s sixteen and she’s been through so much but she’s even more wonderful than you'd expect."

* * *

(“You know I’d do anything to spare her any more suffering.”)

* * *

Christine’s Saturday visits quickly became the highlight of his week, and after they got past the initial awkwardness of those first visits she seemed as happy to see him as he was to see her. He asked about her, most of the time, because he was genuinely interested in her and what she was doing in school and what she was reading about for fun (and it amused him that what she was reading for fun were mostly big history books, so they talked about those and he was on firm ground with that), and he also wanted to give her something to think about that wasn’t her grief.

When she asked him questions, about Sorelli or about Philippe, he answered them when he could, and when the answer might spoil something of her future he was careful to say either that he couldn’t quite remember or that it was something he couldn’t talk about, and cited her older self as his reason to stay quiet, so she accepted that.

When her tears came, he made her more tea, and made it hot, and gave her tissues damp with cold water so the tears wouldn’t leave her face sore.

One week she brought her copy of _Passionate Outsider_ with her with all her stickie notes in it, and a scrapbook of archived newspaper articles she’d printed out about Noël, and they talked about tuberculosis, and relapses, and the bits that, as far as he was concerned, Horgan had gotten wrong, but something stayed his tongue and kept him from talking about his own illness. Kept him from talking about Newcastle and Jack, and instead he swallowed and whispered, “I think we all knew someone who died from it.” It hung in the air a moment longer than he liked, so he cleared his throat and asked her about her violin-playing, and the smile was better on her face than the sadness that had crossed it.

* * *

He was used to Christine visiting him for his birthday, but he was not used to her not having travelled through time to do it.

She turned up at his door a little after noon, wrapped in her big coat, the black dye cut out of her hair, blonde curls framing her face, her violin case slung over her shoulder. When he went to make tea for her, she insisted on doing it for him.

“It’s your birthday after all,” she said, and flashed him a slight grin, and for the first time he got a glimpse of the woman she would grow into, the one who had said that to him so many times when she turned up on that very day, and for a moment his breath caught in his throat.

He swallowed, and managed a smile for her. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

“What trouble is it just to make tea?”

* * *

So she made tea, and they drank it sitting by the fire. And she played him a piece she had composed and it showed real promise, as he told her, and her little smile was pleased. He thought of the day she had played (would play) ‘Mo Ghile Mear’ down at Brittas Bay and he almost told her of it, this thing that her older self had done, but he swallowed it down so as not to spoil it.

She kissed his cheek before she left, and it warmed something deep inside him

“I’ll come to see you after school tomorrow.”

He smiled. “I’ll look forward to it.”

(And he was, and she did.)

* * *

It was seventy years, that year, since Philippe had died. He listened to Rachmaninoff on the old record player, and combed back his hair, and brought the bouquet of lilies Anea had picked up for him with him when he went to the graveyard. It was unseasonably warm for early March, one of those days where the promise of summer breaks through the spring, bright and golden so that it feels like the year has skipped ahead to June. His knee was acting up, so he didn’t stay long in Glasnevin, but it was good just to be there, to be out of the house and at the grave and feel closer to his brother again.

He wasn’t long home when Christine arrived after school. It was a new habit of hers, the occasional week day visit, and he always enjoyed it when she came, but he was tired that day, after his trip and with the emotions of seventy years before feeling oddly fresh and new, so neither of them said much.

She stood a long time, looking at a photo of he and Philippe on top of the mantelpiece. It was taken the summer before—Before, and they were out on the boat. Some local boy had taken it when Philippe showed him how to work the camera, and in the photo they’re both grinning, he and his brother, their eyes shaded against the sun.

One of the last times he was on the water, he thinks, looking back.

But he didn’t say that, because this Christine didn’t know about his aversion towards going near the water, not yet, and he wondered, idly, when it was that she would find out about it.

“Were they happy together?” her voice was soft, and it pulled him out of his wondering, though it took him just a moment to realise that she was referring to Philippe and Sorelli.

“They were.” His own voice was little more than a whisper, and her fingers twitched at her side as she nodded.

“Good. I’m glad.”

* * *

Sometimes it was hard to think that this was not the Christine he had known so long. That it was her, but not yet, that she was growing into his dear friend, getting there, but she was a work in progress, in a way.

Strange, really, to think that he might have had any hand in how she turned out, when she had been his friend for so long before they met truly, properly, in time.

(A privilege, to have touched her life in any way.)

* * *

How he wanted to protect her, that year. To keep her safe from all those things that were happening, keep that renewed grief from her face when there was the Mass that marked a year since Alex had died. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back as he sat in the church lost in the crowd, as she played her father’s violin, and thought of how proud Alex would have been to hear her, thought of how he wouldn’t have had the strength to do anything like that at Philippe’s first anniversary.

She didn’t realise how remarkable she was.

Sometimes, he thinks she still doesn’t.

(Erik does, he knows. He sees it in him every time he mentions her name, the different light in Erik’s eyes to think of her, and knows that he knows he’s found a true treasure.)

* * *

It killed him to see her suffer so with all the fuss over _The Time Traveler’s Wife._ The restlessness of it, the way her bottom lip was bitten raw and her arm scratched from constantly picking at it. That was why he added the whiskey to her tea, the day she came to him, to steady her nerves, and when she curled into a ball on the couch with the newspaper, he decided the time had come to take out all those discs with the documentaries and things that her older self had made, all the things with Noël.

He knew she liked Noël, found him fascinating, and he couldn’t blame her. Noël _was_ fascinating, and if giving her those discs took her mind off the fuss over that damn film, then he would sit beside her and watch every one of them with her if she wanted him to, and never mind the ache of it in his own chest.

The tears prickled in her eyes as he handed them over, and he smiled at her so she’d know it was fine.

It was fine.

* * *

They went out to dinner the day she turned eighteen. He didn’t want to impose on the small celebration she and Anea had decided on, but they insisted he join them so he did, and it was a pleasant evening. He hadn’t been able to think what to get her as a gift. So many of the things he might have considered were things he knew she liked in her future, but in the end he settled on an original copy of Eva Gore-Booth’s _Broken Glory_ from 1918. He found it in a rare books shop, and it struck him as ideal. She liked poetry, and she liked old books, and Sorelli had once played Eva’s sister the Countess, so he wrote an inscription on the inside cover, and had it wrapped.

When the evening came, her hands trembled as she opened it, and when she saw what it was she brushed her fingers over it as carefully as if it was the most fragile glass.

Then she hugged him, and it was so unexpected it winded him, just for a moment, before he hugged her back.

* * *

He swears he must have been nearly as nervous as she was in the run up to her Leaving Cert exams in June 2010. It was a relief to him that she didn’t skip around through time too much, that she was able to sit and focus on her studying, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to settle until she had them all done.

There was nothing he dreaded more than the possibility of her travelling in the middle of an exam, but he didn’t tell her that in case the very act of telling her made it happen. So when she stopped in with him every afternoon he made her tea and they talked about the paper she had just finished and he refused to entertain the possibility of time pulling her away until every exam was out of the way.

The day she brought him the history paper and told him she’d answered on social change in Ireland in the period 1949-1959 despite not having studied that in school he almost put his head in his hands, but he swallowed and forced himself to smile and told her that he was sure she’d answered it perfectly.

(She had, as it happened. He hadn’t doubted her.)

The day she got her results in August he was sitting in the car with Anea while she was in the school picking them up, and it was all he could do to sit still. Then she came rushing out and she was crying and he feared the worst and opened the car door to be ready to get out and assure her she’d done her best and they’d sort everything out, but before he could move she threw herself in and hugged him.

“I did it I did it I did it…” and then she reached across him to hug Anea and he took the sheet of results and examined them.

Top marks, in all seven subjects.

When his own tears came, he did nothing to stop them.

* * *

He was partial to Trinity, of course, having done his own degrees and spent his career there, but he’d been to UCD a few times for conferences and he liked it well enough. That she chose to do her undergrad there took him aback a bit, especially considering that Alex himself was a Trinity man and he’d assumed she’d make the same choice. Then she told him that she was saving Trinity for her PhD, and he decided that maybe she’d made the best choice after all.

* * *

There were two times, that winter, that he saw her in a terrible state. The first was when she had just gotten back from 1939, visiting Sorelli in the hospital for the first time, and when she turned up at his door in tears and threw herself into his arms, he hugged her and didn’t ask where she had been, just waited for her to tell him herself. And when she did, he sat her down and gave her a finger of whiskey in a glass, and made her drink it slow to steady herself.

“It was an awful place,” she said, and he squeezed her hand, and nodded.

“I know.”

The second was Christmas Day.

She and Anea had invited him to Christmas dinner, the third one since they had met properly, so he got a taxi to their house and brought a bottle of wine with him. He’d given Anea the gifts he’d gotten them the evening before, when she came to tell him Christine had travelled and she wasn’t sure she’d be back in time for Christmas dinner but they’d go ahead with it anyway. And he was wondering if she’d be back or not, when Anea opened the door to him.

“She’s a bit out of sorts,” she said as she took the wine and gestured him to the couch, and he wracked his brain to think when Christine might have come back from but couldn’t settle on a likely possibility aside from maybe 1939 again.

She was quiet, all right, when Anea insisted they not lift a finger to help her lay out dinner, and there was something distant in her eyes, so when she sat beside him on the couch, he asked her what was on her mind, in case it was something best put into words. He didn’t expect her to ask him what he remembered of New Year’s Eve 1942, and it took him just a moment to reach back through the years to that long-ago night.

Then it struck him, a blonde-haired girl and a kiss.

Christine.

No wonder she was feeling out of sorts. He was out of sorts just to remember it.

So he told her, first, that it had blurred into other New Year’s, and then he decided to let her know he did remember and it didn’t matter at all, and when he quoted Sorelli (“a very clever lady once told me it is best not to dwell on the fingerprints left by that girl in our pasts”) he saw the relief that crossed her face.

“Me?”

And he felt his grin widen. “Sorelli.” And he remembered the night he had confessed to Sorelli, that he had once kissed Christine, long ago, and how she brushed it off as not mattering, and when Christine leaned into him, there on the couch that Christmas Day, he knew she understood that sometimes, what happened in the past was better off forgotten.

* * *

That she met a boy named Nollaig, a law student, he did not expect. He seemed a nice enough boy from what she told him, and he was happy that she was happy, something brighter in her eyes that he had not seen before, but he couldn’t help wondering what it was that would happen to bring things to an end.

Her future self had never mentioned a Nollaig.

He might have been an old man, but so help him if that boy hurt Christine he’d have words with him.

If he met him, he’d tell him as much.

But he never got the chance. It was only six weeks later that Anea rang him with the news Nollaig was dead. Just collapsed, dead.

How he hung the phone up and it didn’t just slip from his fingers he will never understand.

* * *

That Christine should have to bury a boy she was coming to love—

He thought of Jack. Thought of Jack, and kissing him for the last time before his surgery. Thought of Jack, and Noël coming to tell him he was dead. Thought of Jack, and the tears burned in his eyes, and he wished—how he wished she didn’t have to go through that too.

* * *

All he could do was hold her hand through the funeral and it didn’t feel like half enough.

She sat there stoic and pale between he and Anea, and he wished he could take that look from her eyes.

* * *

She should never have had to suffer through anything like that. Certainly not at her age, only eighteen.

Fuck.

Only eighteen, and to have to deal with that?

He was eleven years older when Jack died and he hardly survived it.

* * *

All through that spring she was quiet, different, and his heart ached and he wanted to tell her, so many times, that he understood, that she didn’t have to suffer alone because he had been there and she could tell him anything and he would understand, but the words wouldn’t come and all he could do was make her tea and squeeze her hand and hug her when the tears came.

If he could only find a way to put Jack into words and let her _know_ that he knew—

* * *

The unnatural cruelty of it.

* * *

It was May when Alex came.

Alex, come forward from the day before he died, tired and grey.

When Christine turned up at his door with Alex at her side, he almost fainted clean away, but he steadied himself by gripping the door handle and gesturing them in.

“Raoul,” she said, and she sounded happier than at any time since before Nollaig died, “I want you to meet my dad, Alex Daaé.” And Alex gave him a look that said she didn’t know that they knew each other already so he knew he had to play along, so he shook Alex’s hand and said it was wonderful to meet him.

Christine slipped into the library, because Alex said he’d like to talk to him alone a few minutes, and his smile was gentle, and when she was gone Alex turned to him and Raoul couldn’t contain himself a moment longer.

He hugged him tight, and swallowed.

“How?”

And Alex laughed into his ear. “Time travel, my dear Professor.”

Raoul stepped back and brushed away the tears that burned his eyes. “I know that but how—how—” His knees buckled, and Alex’s hand on his arm led him to his armchair.

“It’ll happen a few times,” Alex said softly, taking his hand and squeezing it. “It’s all already happened for me, but it’ll happen a few more times for you.”

“I didn’t think any of us would see you again.” His voice cracked. He should have thought of it, he should have, he’s dealt with this time travelling business longer than anyone, he should have known.

“I know. And it’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing.”

His laugh sounded half-hysterical even to his own ears. “Damn right it is.” How ridiculous, him sitting there talking to a man three years dead yet perfectly alive in his living room. As if the whole world had tilted. Was this how Christine felt every time she came into the past and met him? Met Sorelli?

Christ. To be dealing with that the whole time.

He pushed the thought away, and swallowed. “I’m glad you could come,” he whispered, feeling a little steadier, and Alex squeezed his hand again.

“So am I,” he whispered. “So am I.”


	39. 39

On the day that it was twenty years since Sorelli died (twenty years since Christine was born), Christine came with her violin. He gave her a hundred-year-old book of pressed flowers and poetry that he’d tracked down and bought for her, and there were tears in her eyes as she brushed her fingers over it. Then they lit candles, and drank cocoa that she made and added chartreuse to, and that was the evening that they sat down and watched the news coverage about Sorelli’s death.

“They’ve digitized it as something culturally significant,” she whispered, and though his throat was aching he smiled.

 _Culturally significant._ She was that, and so much more.

They could never know the half of it.

* * *

Afterwards, they watched one of her films, from 1952. And he told Christine that though it was released that year, it had been filmed the year before.

“Mostly she was working on directing a play. She didn’t have time to appear in a film.” That was what he told Christine, and he left the bit out that it was Sorelli’s choice to cancel her work that year, because she wanted to be close to him in Newcastle, in case he needed her. He wanted to tell her about it, about his tuberculosis, but the words wouldn’t come and the answer he gave seemed good enough.

“You should write a book about her.” Christine’s voice was soft. “Those are things no one else would ever know.”

He smiled, slightly, and squeezed her hand. “I’d have to leave out too much.”

* * *

(She will write the book about Sorelli. And it will be full of his memories, things he wrote after Sorelli’s death and never did anything with, and things that she will know from having gone into the past, and she will say that he was planning to write it, and had gathered all this research together, and it will be acclaimed for its accuracy. And he knows this, because she told him, her future self come back, and she used his typewriter to type notes for it, so that if anyone thought to check, then she could present them as a source.)

(He wrote out a good deal of stuff for her to include, for the sake of authenticity.)

(As a historian he should disapprove of such manufactured sources. But the information in them was all accurate. And when Christine was not supposed to exist in the past, they had to find some way to record the things she knew, so that the world might believe them.)

* * *

The hardest thing was the melancholy in her eyes every time Alex returned to his own time.

A blessing that she could still have her father in some way though he was dead. But every time he had to return, she came to him and lay on his couch by the fire, and didn’t speak, just played her violin, softly, slowly. Sometimes she sketched, instead, but there was always that haunting sadness in her face, and how it pained him that he could not take it away, that he could do nothing except make her tea, and drape a blanket over her when she fell asleep, and have tissues ready, in case she needed to cry.

* * *

The time that it happened that he was in hospital when Alex came and went again, she slipped in to see him though it was past visiting hours. He was in a private room, and it was quiet (a chest infection this time, and he was on oxygen with it, but the antibiotics and the painkillers were making him tired). She came and sat beside him, and threaded their fingers together, and he was too tired to keep his eyes open, but her touch was gentle, brushing his hair back from his face.

Her head was heavy as she lay it on his shoulder, and he felt her tears a warm dampness against his neck.

“Every time he goes it’s like losing him again,” she murmured, her voice half-muffled, and he squeezed her fingers, and wished he could take her in his arms.

“I know,” he whispered. “I know.”

* * *

Darius came to him that night in his dreams, and they walked hand-in-hand along the beach at Brittas Bay. The water cast golden with the sunset, light warm on their skin, and Darius’ hand cupped the back of his neck, Darius’ lips soft pressed to his, and they lay down on the sand and held each other, just held each other.

He woke with the tears damp on his cheeks, and he was too tired to wipe them away.

* * *

The day he turned ninety, Anea insisted they celebrate it. Celebrating it meant a dinner that she made for the three of them, and a cake big enough to fit ninety small little birthday candles ( _where_ she found ninety little birthday candles he had no idea) and when he attempted to count them he got up to twenty-three before Christine swatted his hand away and told him she’d already counted them.

A frightening sight, ninety small birthday candles stuck into a cake. Surely it was some sort of a fire hazard.

(Was he really that old?)

Afterwards, she presented him with a leather-bound book of photographs. Of him, and of Philippe, and of Sorelli, and among them was the one Jack had taken of him in the sanatorium, by the window with his hair mussed, that first platinotype, but instead of all these photos being in black and white like they really were, like he _knew_ they were because he’d looked at some of them only that morning, they were all in colour, Philippe’s eyes bright blue just like they really had been, Sorelli’s hair that deep dark brown so dark it was almost black, the trees outside the window he was framed against just as green as they really had been in Newcastle.

And he looked at them, and brushed his trembling fingers over them, but he couldn’t understand, couldn’t fathom how they were in colour, and he looked up at her through the tears in his eyes, and found her smiling softly.

“When you were in hospital,” she whispered, “I borrowed them, and scanned them into the computer. And there’s things you can get, software, that lets you find the colours things would have been, and make them that colour, as if the photo had always been that way.”

He swallowed around the tightness in his throat, and set the book aside, and drew her to him, and hugged her.

“Thank you,” he whispered in her ear, and it wasn’t enough, not hardly enough to say for what she had done, but they were the only words he could find. “Thank you.”

* * *

He treasures that book deeply, takes it out every now and then to look at it, handling it as gently as if it were a baby, always afraid he might damage it somehow, accidentally.

That she went to such trouble on his account—

It’s more, even now, than he can try to put words around.

* * *

She’s done several sketches for him, too, through the years, and he keeps each of them safe. Some of them she has not done yet, in this time, the work of her future self, but his favourite is one she gave him only three weeks ago, of the three of them in 1946, he and Sorelli sitting under a tree, their legs stretched before them, Sorelli wearing trousers because she’d decided it was her right, and he remembers that day because he’d wondered aloud if he should put on a skirt, and Sorelli had told him it would suit his legs to show them off more, and they were both laughing over it when Christine appeared. In the sketch, she is sprawled on the ground with a book to shade her face from the sun, and he remembers that the book was a collection of Shelley.

A beautiful rendering, of a perfect afternoon.

* * *

On the day that Sorelli would have been a hundred, Christine was off somewhere in the past. He hoped, as ever, that she was with her, and that they were happy.

For his own part, he spent it mostly in his armchair. RTÉ put on the documentary they’d made about her after she died, and he cringed to see himself from more than twenty-two years earlier talking about her, but he could think of no better way to pay tribute to her than to sit down and watch it.

Then they followed it with the old film where she’d played Countess Markievicz, and he grinned to see her there on the screen at her best, in the scenes of the Rising, at the Royal College of Surgeons with her hat and her pistols threatening to shoot any man who defied her.

She’d told him, after, that it was one of her favourite scenes she’d ever performed, and to see it again, and know how much she’d enjoyed it, made it all the better.

They couldn’t have chosen a better film to honour her with.

* * *

He was proud of Christine when she graduated with top marks from her undergrad, and prouder still that she was on course to do the same from her Masters, and he told her as much on the day that she turned twenty-two.

The day after, she stayed in Maynooth late, and detoured out to Malahide to see him before she went home.

“I’ve got two pieces of good news,” she said, her eyes bright and cheeks flushed as she set a bottle of champagne down on the table.

“Are you going to tell me or do I have to guess?” he asked as he searched in the drawer for a cloth to give her a better grip, and she grinned as he handed it over.

“You can guess if you want but I’ll tell you as soon as I have this open.”

“In that case I think I’ll wait.” He found two glasses and rinsed them and set them on the table, and with a pop the champagne opened. “Don’t want to make a fool of myself.” Her grin widened as she filled the glasses, and he settled into the chair to wait for her to be ready.

“A toast,” she said, passing his glass to him and holding hers up. “To Trinity and my PhD!”

The warmth that spread through him made his heart swell and he grinned across the table at her. “Fantastic!” They drank to her PhD, and she filled their glasses again.

“And a second toast,” and her blush deepened just enough to make him wonder if he knew what was coming. “A second toast to the Roost, and the boy I just met there playing the piano.”

He raised an eyebrow at her, wondering if his suspicion was correct. “Do you think that he—”

She nodded so intensely she almost spilled her champagne. “I’ve already met him in the future.”

The future? She hadn’t told him that, and he thought, then, that he already knew the answer to his next question, but he asked it anyway. “What’s his name?”

And her eyes sparkled. “Erik.”

* * *

Erik.

She’d finally met Erik.

He’d hoped to live long enough to meet him. He hadn’t thought it would come so quick.

* * *

“I’m delighted for you,” he said, and kissed her cheek. “On both counts.”

She hugged him tight. “I know you are.”

* * *

“I can’t wait to introduce you two,” she said, two weeks later, and he smiled to himself behind his newspaper. “He plays the piano and the violin and he’s a computer scientist as well. You’ll love him.”

He set his paper down and grinned at her. “I’m sure I will.”

* * *

It was two days later that he heard the thud upstairs and knew she’d arrived back from sometime. He got up and put the kettle boiling, and was ready to ask her where she’d been, when she stumbled into the kitchen, and he knew something had happened, knew she’d been somewhere terrible, when he saw how pale she was, when he saw her face still splotchy from tears.

“When—” Before he could finish the question, there were fresh tears trickling from her eyes, and he pulled her into his arms to ease her trembling. “When were—”

“I was with Philippe when he died.” Her voice breathless, a gasp. “I was there as they pulled him from the water and I tried to stop the bleeding but I couldn’t, Raoul, I swear I tried but I couldn’t and he died, and he died and I was holding him—” a rush of words and she choked on a sob and the tears were burning in his own eyes, _she was there when Philippe died, she was there when he died, she was there she was there, she was there…_ And he gasped against the pain lancing through his chest, and held on tight.

* * *

(When he could breathe again, he swallowed and kissed her hair and whispered, “I wondered if you might have been,” and she was still trembling as he reached into the cabinet and took out the bottle of whiskey. The mugs were already on the table from the tea he never made, and he poured a measure into each of them, and passed hers over to her.)

(“A toast,” he whispered, “to Philippe,” and they each knocked back their shot. It burned as he swallowed, made his eyes water again, and he poured another. “A toast to Sorelli,” and they clinked their glasses again, and he gasped this time as he swallowed it, and Christine’s hands were still shaking but she had been there, she had been there, how _—why_ did she have to be there? “And a toast to you,” he whispered, “that there was someone he knew at his side.” And fresh tears trickled from her eyes as he poured it.)

(Philippe had known her, he knows, has always known, to some extent. Did he know she was there that day? Was he aware of it in some way? And was it a comfort to him if he did, to be in the arms of someone he’d cared about?)

(Questions with no answers, questions begetting more questions, and he does his best not to think about them, his best not to wonder, but they come again anyway, and there is no not-wondering. There is only knowing what he knows, and trying to figure out the rest.)


	40. 40

It was early June when she came to him and told him she wanted Erik to meet him.

He’d been wondering when it would happen, and he set down his newspaper and put his reading glasses on top of them.

“He’s already met Anea,” she was saying, “and I really want—”

He lay his hand on top of her hers, and smiled. “Just tell me when, and I’ll put on a good shirt.”

There was a light blue one he was very fond of that would do the job.

“You don’t have to go to any trouble,” she whispered, and he squeezed her fingers.

“He’s important to you. I want to.”

* * *

It was the next morning that she brought Erik to see him. She’d told him that the boy had had several surgeries on his face to repair a birth deformity (and his heart ached to think of a young child having gone through so much), and true there was a certain asymmetry about the young man she introduced him to, but it added a charm to him, and the twist of what must once have been a harelip added a slightly crooked character to his face, something a little distinguished.

He shook the hand of this tall young man who was clearly nervous, and smiled at him. “I’ve heard a great deal about you,” and something flickered in Erik’s eyes to hear it, like a half-question, but his grip was steady on Raoul’s hand.

“All good I hope.”

Christine excused herself to make tea for them, and he asked her to bring the biscuits, and then he turned his attention back to Erik, fiddling with a stray thread on his jumper, and decided that the best he could do was put the boy at ease.

“Christine tells me you’re a musician.”

The magical combination of words, and Erik’s fingers stilled as he smiled. “I am.”

* * *

When Christine came to him, hardly a week later, upset after a visit to 1939, upset after the Sorelli of that time told her she never wanted to see her again, he settled her on the couch and added whiskey to her tea, and ached to tell her that it would only be temporary, ached to tell her that someday she would find Sorelli in 1945 and it would be different, so very different.

He wanted to. Oh, how he wanted to. He opened his mouth for to find the words but they all escaped from his head and when he tried again he coughed instead, and concern flickered through the grief in her face but he waved her off.

“I’m fine, I’m fine, it’s nothing.” Why couldn’t he tell her? Why? Why must she suffer thinking Sorelli would hate her forever? Why must she have to feel that ache of love in her heart and think it unrequited? Who decreed that such a thing must happen?

He couldn’t answer, couldn’t say, could only squeeze her hand and whisper, “Give it time,” and watch as tears welled fresh in her eyes again.

(What he would not have given in that moment, to be able to go back in time himself and tell Sorelli to never say that terrible thing.)

He wrapped his arms around her, and drew her close, and let her cry until she fell asleep. And then he dried the tears from her face, and covered her with a blanket.

Let her sleep as long as she needed.

* * *

It was not a tremendous surprise, a little more than an hour later, when Erik turned up on his doorstep. Erik, the worry clear to see in his face, and Raoul knew without asking that he had come in hope of finding Christine, so he invited him in and told him she was asleep on the couch, and when the surprise crossed Erik’s face that he knew, when Erik saw her and seemed to weaken, he decided the boy needed a drink.

Tea, first, and to have some things explained to him, about Christine, and Sorelli, and what had happened, and time.

Erik was, if possible, even paler, after he explained about knowing her since 1945, the older her, but how she had only met him in 2008. He considered offering him whiskey to steady him, but decided chartreuse was a better choice.

Whiskey for grief, chartreuse for time, and celebration.

(An odd relief, that he could say these things to Erik, even if he could not speak them to Christine herself.)

* * *

It was good of Erik to visit him whenever Christine was away. He had not expected him to do so but he was glad that he did, that he took the time to with how busy he was with his computer work and his music.

How strange it felt, that the Erik he’d heard so much about, that Christine had first told him of in 1973 after Darius left, would be sitting there in his kitchen or at the fire, telling him about his computer coding and 3D modeling and all these things that didn’t exist all those years ago, but that he has made a career out of, and though Raoul has no head for such things it was and is interesting to hear about, and reminds him of the colourised photographs Christine had given him for his birthday.

He asked Erik, early in their friendship, about colourising photographs, and it amused him when Erik gave a wave of his hand, and said it was easy.

“I could teach you if you want,” he said, and Raoul snorted.

“I think I’m a bit old for picking up new skills.”

* * *

It amused him, and warmed him, to find Erik so interested in Christine’s research, so interested in hearing his old stories of sixty and seventy years ago, especially when he confessed that he never knew much of history.

“I want to be able to keep up with her,” he said, “to talk to her about it properly and not just ask questions she’ll think are stupid.”

Raoul smiled. “You know there’s no such thing as a stupid question, don’t you?”

“I know but you know what I mean. I want to know something about it all when I’m talking to her.”

He could see Erik was earnest, could see Erik really did want to be able to discuss Christine’s research with her, and it was that that endeared him to Raoul forever.

“In that case, I suggest you start with _Against the Tide_.”

* * *

He knew Christine and Erik would be happy together, knew it in a clear logical way because he knew from her older self. But it warmed him to see it for himself, in those early months. And it was a comfort, that Christine would know happiness in her own time, that she would be loved.

He only ever wanted the best for her.

* * *

They went for a lot of walks that summer, he and Christine. A lot of walks, none of them particularly long, and they never said much to each other but they didn’t need to. It was enough, on those sunny July afternoons, just to have her on his arm as they went down the street, just to feel her beside him.

Just to know that she was in the present, and that she was happy.

* * *

To anyone looking in, that first Christmas, they would make the picture of a family. Him playing the old grandfather (maybe great-grandfather, such peculiar thoughts), Anea assumed to be his daughter, Christine his granddaughter (the most peculiar thought), and Erik her boyfriend. And yet, in actuality, not a drop of blood shared between any of them, nothing that would mark them as a family in any traditional sense of the word.

And yet, looking at these three people so dear to him (and how quickly Erik earned a place in his heart), he had a sense that that was what they were. A family, in their own way, of their choosing.

And looking at them, he would not have had it any other way.

* * *

The pneumonia, that time, came on him as a bad cold early in the new year. A bad cold, and it went into his chest, and by his birthday it had landed him in hospital (again), breathless and tired and sore, every breath tearing in his lungs.

The oxygen helped, and the painkillers, and the antibiotics, and it all together just left him so tired.

Damn tuberculosis damaging his lungs the way it did. Damn _age_.

* * *

Christine came to see him, and Erik, to wish him as happy a birthday as he could have. He could see they were worried about him, could see the fear in Christine’s eyes that this might be the coming of the end, and he wanted to tell them otherwise, wanted to assure them that he’d recover from this and go on another two years, but the words wouldn’t come, so he had to settle for smiling at them instead, and thanking them for coming to see him.

Erik told him he’d found some jazz records to give him when he was out, and the thought of them lightened his mood a bit, but he could see Erik couldn’t settle in the room, couldn’t know what to say to see him so ill, so when he made his excuses and slipped out, Raoul didn’t mind. He wouldn’t have him feeling out of place on his account.

He squeezed Christine’s fingers tight, and gathered all his strength to whisper “you won’t have to dust off your Auden yet,” and it was all he could say, the only way he could think to tell her that she didn’t have to worry about him this time, but hardly had the words left his mouth when he saw the tears shining in her eyes and he repented saying them at all, repented that he had made her think of his death even accidentally.

“You know what I mean,” he whispered, and his throat was so sore he was hoarser than a moment before.

She shushed him, and squeezed his fingers. “I know,” and her voice was soft, “I know.”

* * *

He was long-home again by the day she came to see him and tell him she had met Philippe in 1934, and as they sipped their tea she told him all about it, how Philippe had insisted she join he and Sorelli for dinner, and how he seemed delighted to meet her. That she had not expected him to be so tall made Raoul snort, and his heart ached to hear her because he could just picture his brother as she must have seen him, tall and elegant and wearing one of his fine evening suits and with that slightly crooked smile and how he longed to have been there himself, longed to see him, just once.

Hearing about him from her was not the same, but every word she spoke of him was a treasure.

The tears prickled his eyes, and her thumb was soft, wiping them away.

* * *

(“He was happy,” her voice low, soft, “they both were.” And he drew in a shaky breath, and swallowed. “I’m glad they were,” his own voice faint. “I’m glad.”)

* * *

(“I’m glad they had each other. That she wasn’t—that neither of them were alone.”)

* * *

(“They loved each other very much. And I think—I think a part of her never recovered from losing him.” _A part of me never recovered either,_ he thought, but could not say.)

* * *

(“It’s good to know they’re still out there,” he whispered. “Good to know you can still go back and find them, that they haven’t--haven’t been erased from the world.” And it sounded ridiculous to his own ears because of course she could find them, of course when she was going into the past, but he had to say it and she brushed her thumb over his knuckles and nodded.)

(“I know what you mean,” she whispered. “I know what you mean.”)

* * *

The referendum on same-sex marriage was a little more than two weeks later. 22 May 2015.

That it would fall on the anniversary of when she had first travelled into the past made him smile.

* * *

How far the world had moved on. When he had loved Jack, had first learned about himself, it was illegal to do the things they did, to touch each other the way they did and kiss and feel the feelings that were in their hearts. All the nights when they had hardly dared breathe too loud in case they were discovered, how they always had to slip back to their own beds by morning—to dream of it being allowed was impossible, and even when he and Darius were together they kept such secrecy it was almost suffocating (would things have been different, if they had not had to be a secret?), and it was only after Sorelli had been dead a year that it finally became all right in the eyes of the law to be what they had been.

And they were voting on marriage, to allow people like him to be married.

It was almost more than he could get his head around.

Such change, in only a few decades…

* * *

Erik brought him to the polling station. So help him but he never missed a vote in all his years, even managed to vote from hospital in 1973, and old and frail as he might be but he was not about to miss this one.

He’d come out of retirement to write an article about it, and the importance of voting yes, and Christine typed it for him and sent it off, and he knew publishing it was outing him to the world after all his years of being careful, and not even his AIDS activism in the ‘80s had really done it, but this would and he didn’t care.

Let them know. He was old and he was tired and so help him but he was _gay_ , too.

(Finally the word seemed to fit and feel right.)

And when the day for voting came, he dressed in his best and Erik brought him to the polling station and his hand trembled as he held that pencil, and marked his X in the box beside _Tá, Yes_.

There were tears in his eyes as he folded it, and he thought of Sorelli, thought of Darius, and wished he could tell them.

* * *

How he wept the next day, watching the coverage of the count.

A landslide victory.

The footage of all those young people in the streets, and not so young, wrapped in their rainbow flags, laughing and crying and celebrating, and he was so proud, so happy, to think that they could have the things he never could have, that they could know the happiness he had had and so much more, and no law could tell them otherwise, that they could be free in a way he had never been.

They were what it had all been for.

Erik was in his garden, pruning his roses for him, and Anea was pottering around his kitchen, making a cake to celebrate. And Christine was sitting on the arm of his chair, and she wrapped her arms around him and pulled him close, and as the tears rolled down his cheeks he lay his head against her shoulder, and she kissed his hair and held him, just held him, and didn’t say a word.

He didn’t need her to.


	41. 41

It was six weeks later that she was presenting at her first conference.

Her first conference, a milestone in the life of any academic, and for Christine even more so. One ordinary thing to have in her far from ordinary life. How could he be anywhere but in the audience while she presented her first paper?

It was about Noël and tuberculosis, and her own theory – that she had been developing for seven years, from the summer before they first met, right after her father died – that Noël’s tuberculosis had had a key influence on the Mother and Child Crisis. It was well-written and excellently argued, and he knew because she’d asked him to proofread it like she did with every draft chapter for her thesis, and it was always excellent work.

So he went, with Erik, because neither of them could bear to be anywhere else and both of them wanted to be there to support her. Some of the other speakers and attendees were faces he remembered from his own conference days before his retirement, and to see them there to hear Christine (and everyone else too but the only one he cared about was Christine) caught him a little sideways.

That they had seen him speak, once upon a time, and now they would see her—

The passage of time, whispering again.

He shook the hand of everyone who came up to him, and he couldn’t help it but when they asked why he was there he told them he came to see his granddaughter, and they seemed to have forgotten he’d never married or had a daughter never mind a granddaughter, and they believed him, and it amused him to think that he could convince them of such a thing.

Erik sitting beside him was clearly trying not to smile as he looked at the program of scheduled talks.

* * *

The pride in his heart to watch Christine up there, so professional, so prepared, so precise, was more than could possibly be put into words. With the tears prickling his eyes he could hardly see her, and Erik must have noticed because he squeezed his hand, and Raoul gave him a watery smile to let him know that he was all right.

She handled the questions beautifully, including the one that was really a comment, and he’d always known it, but he saw, then, how brilliant she was going to be.

That wonderful, marvellous girl.

* * *

And how it filled his heart, afterwards, to see her so happy, dancing with Erik in his living room. Such deserved happiness, for both of them, with all they had been through.

He would give them every moment of it if he could.

He closed his eyes, and sat back in his chair, and let the music float around him, and thought of Sorelli, and how happy she would be, to know Christine would be so happy in her own time.

And how he missed her so terribly.

* * *

How he missed Sorelli with such an ache that year.

Between Christine, and Erik, and Anea, he hardly had time to be lonely. But he missed her. Every day he missed her. The ache seemed worse than ever.

* * *

He told Christine as much, that winter, the evenings closing in, and all those old memories so close to the surface. Told her about Sorelli and how he missed her and how she didn’t have to have anything to do with him after Philippe died but she did anyway and it was how they came to be friends, because they’d both needed someone. Told her, for the first time, of how he was never able to go on the water, after Philippe’s death, and how he has always had nightmares of it, all these years since. Told her not because he wanted to sadden her but because he needed to say it, and he knew she would understand.

Her fingers were solid and real between his, and he could never say how much it meant, to have her, and be able to tell her.

* * *

It was April when Erik came to him with scones.

He couldn’t remember the last time he had scones, but he suspected it must be twenty years, or close to it, since he’d last visited Noël and Phyllis in their cottage in Connemara.

For Erik to appear with a collection of scones in a biscuit tin could only mean that Christine had gone travelling, and when he asked, Erik nodded. “Since yesterday afternoon.”

A flash of a café, the smoke of a cigarette. Sitting at a table with two cups of tea and handing a newspaper across. The memory of it popped unbidden into his head, and when he glanced at the calendar he knew he was right.

She had said she was coming from April 2016.

How strange, to have been there when she arrived, and to see it from the other side when she left.

Time spinning in its little circle, coming back around again.

“April 1951,” he said, and he couldn’t help his smile. Erik looked up at him from the scones he was buttering, a query in his eyes as to how he knew, and he tapped the stack of papers on the table, the draft of her thesis. “She spent a week and loved every minute of it.”

A week, right after it all came down. Right after Noël’s resignation as Minister, and she’d read every newspaper and went with him to each sitting of the Dáil and they discussed it every evening, in this very kitchen, exactly sixty-five years earlier.

Erik was smiling, his eyes shining, as he passed over a scone, and Raoul broke off a bit of it to test it.

The taste took him back twenty years to that cottage in Connemara, Phyllis Browne’s recipe. But how—how would Erik know it? And then it dawned on him. She’d included it in the book she’d written about her time with Noël, after he died.

And Erik must have read it, to have found it again.

(Time, coming back around, another whisper.)

* * *

It was Christine who told him about Erik’s car crash, three days later. A future Christine come back. And when he told her the date, 17 April 2016, she sat down heavily and told him to be ready, that any minute the phone was going to ring, and it would be Anea to tell him.

A car crash.

“He’s going to be all right,” she said, and he was so stunned he couldn’t speak, could only stare at her and remember too keenly the day she had told him Sorelli was about to die. “He will. He has a concussion, and broken ribs, and he’ll need surgery for his shoulder but he’s going to be fine so don’t worry.”

And he knew she was right, knew she had already lived through this, but how could he not worry?

* * *

He was ready when Anea rang, and ready when she arrived and collected him so they could go and see Erik.

For all the times he himself had been in hospital, the last time he had gone to see someone _else_ was Harry, the day before he died.

The memory always so clear of that bandage wrapped around his head and how still he was lying there, not even able to breathe for himself.

The tears were dangerously close to the surface but he swallowed them down. It wouldn’t do for Erik to see him cry, wouldn’t do at all.

* * *

Erik was so pale, lying there in bed, the stitched gash on his forehead. It was all Raoul could do not to shudder at the sight of it, at the sight of that gash and all the wires and tubes, and he forced himself to smile so Erik wouldn’t be worried, and told him that he’d told the nurses he was his grandfather, just to make him smile too, but the sight of Erik so injured, so broken, was almost more than he could bear.

He held it in, and it was only back in the car again that he lost his grip on the tears, and Anea pulled over and took his hand and held it tight as the shivering wracked him.

Her hand was soft, dabbing the tears away.

* * *

He was the one that had to tell Christine about the crash when she got back, and he never hated anything more.

Hardly had he told her that Erik was going to be all right when she was out the door rushing for the train so she could get to the hospital.

He couldn’t blame her. He just swallowed, and braced himself, and rang Anea so she would know to be there when she arrived.

* * *

It was that very evening when Christine came to see him from the hospital, and she was pale and tired but smiling.

“We’re going to get married,” she said, and he stared at her, hardly daring to breathe. “We’re going to get married. Erik proposed as soon as I got there.”

It took a minute for the full force of her words to hit him. _Going to get married…going to get married…Erik proposed…_ But when it did, he jumped out of his chair, and hugged her tight.

“Congratulations,” and he was hoarse with tears and she was laughing in his ear, “Congratulations.”

* * *

“I don’t have any champagne so the chartreuse will have to do.”

Her smile soft. “The chartreuse will be perfect.”

* * *

The firelight soft, flickering across her face, her voice low. “Will you give me away?”

A beat, the tears prickling his eyes again, his heart skipping. _Give her away...give her away..._

He swallowed. “I would be honoured.”

* * *

He hadn’t had a use for his old piano in years. Hadn’t touched it in who could tell how long and his fingers were too stiff anyway to play anything.

His fingers always fumbled on it anyway. It had always been Philippe’s more than his, even in death.

Getting it tuned and promising it to Erik as a wedding gift was only the decent thing to do, and if anyone would treasure that old thing as it deserved, it would be Erik.

The happiness in his eyes as he told him made Raoul’s heart swell to see.

* * *

That Erik chose to spend the last night before the wedding with him touched him to his core.

He never could have had a son, but if he had, then he’d be happy if he was even half the man Erik is.

Before Erik left, he hugged him, and told him that. And told him, too, that he couldn’t think of any better man to love Christine.

“You’ve made her so happy,” he whispered, watching the tears well in those hazel eyes. “And I’m sure that will never change, for the rest of your lives.”

* * *

21 May 2016.

The day Christine married Erik.

One of the happiest days of his life, one of the happiest moments, as he walked her down the aisle, her arm linked through his, him leaning on his cane for support.

He bought a new suit for the occasion, and even got his hair trimmed.

The nineteenth anniversary of the day Noël died, the nineteenth anniversary of Harry’s funeral. And she knew about one but not about the other because he had not told her about Harry (and he still has not), and when she told him her choice of date, she squeezed his hand and said,

“I’d like you to have a good memory of the date.” And then she smiled. “Besides, the day after is the anniversary of when I first went travelling. It feels right to have them close together.”

Her choice, and, he decided, it was a good one.

* * *

That he was crying as he walked her down the short aisle in the registrar’s office he didn’t care. Of course he was going to cry. She was getting married, why wouldn’t he cry?

He released her in front of the desk, and someone got him a chair, and as he watched them exchange their vows, Erik still so frail with his arm in a sling, as he watched them sign their names to those documents, the tears still trickled warm down his cheeks.

Anea squeezed his shoulder, and he looked up into her face, and found her crying too.

* * *

He held out hope all day that Alex would arrive, and he did.

After all his years he could, sometimes, sense when someone was bound to appear. And such a relief it was to see him, such a relief that he could share in the happy day.

He and Anea slipped into the kitchen to give Alex and the newlyweds some privacy.

The music was still spinning soft on the record player, and they could hear it through the crack in the door. And he was long past dancing, but he drew her into his arms, and she kissed his cheek, and they swayed there, slowly, peacefully, just feeling the music in their bones.

“They deserve every bit of happiness they can get,” she whispered, and he smiled.

“And they’ll have plenty of it.”

* * *

He was not surprised that Christine disappeared in time. He just poured some more chartreuse, and set a new record going, and hoped she wouldn’t be gone long.

And she wasn’t. Ten minutes, tops, and she was back, flushed and smiling and so happy he wondered where she had been as she settled back into Erik’s arms, and Alex grinned at him from the couch.

So happy, and he thought it best to let her keep it, just for herself.

* * *

He didn’t expect her to tell him the next afternoon where it was that she’d gone to. Didn’t expect her to sit across the table from him and look him in the eye and say, “I went to 1945.”

He raised a brow, suspecting he knew what was about to come. “Anything interesting happen?”

The grin spread across her face, her eyes shining with the same happiness from the night before. “I kissed Sorelli. Or she kissed me. I can’t remember. But we kissed, and she forgave me for never telling her about Philippe, and she told me she loved me and always had.”

The tears were prickling his eyes as he hugged her, his voice hoarse as he whispered, “I’ve always hoped I’d live to see it.”

* * *

(“You knew all along and you didn’t tell me.” “I couldn’t. I wanted to, so many times, but I couldn’t.” And she hugged him again and kissed his cheek and said, “I know. I understand.”)

(“I’m just glad to have her now.”)


	42. 42

She’s been going more often, since that night. Since she found Sorelli and made things up and they redefined their relationship into something more, something better than how it had been. He misses her more than he would have in the past, with his own time getting short, but he can’t begrudge her her time out of time, can’t begrudge her her time with Sorelli, or her time with him, the younger him of all those years ago for whom she was a marvel and an amazement.

(She still is a marvel, and he will always consider her so.)

So she goes into the past and he’s happy for her, and happy when she comes back happy. And when she settles onto her favourite part of the couch, and passes him a mug of hot tea, and tells him all about where she’s been and what she’s seen, he decides that he doesn’t miss her very much when she’s gone, because the missing of her is nothing compared to the delight of her telling him of her adventures.

* * *

He wrote his last proper historical article in the summer of 2016. It was coming up to the centenary of Casement’s execution, and it was a detailed analysis of the literature published on his diaries, dating back to the earliest of the forgery theories. He’d been working on it quietly for months, re-reading old books and notes and new pieces, and he’d kept the drafting of it secret from Christine but he hadn’t wanted her to think he might wear himself out, never mind he could write about Casement in his sleep. But when it was all written up, she was the one he got to type it for him.

He can work these computers well enough, but it would take him an age to type it.

“I can’t believe you wrote all this and didn’t tell me,” she muttered as she worked at it, and he snorted, crossing out another couple of sentences in the printed draft of her thesis.

“I didn’t want you to try and talk me out of it. Now, I think if you re-word this section, and link it to this bit here…”

* * *

(It was a while later that he looked up and found her smiling at him, something distant in her eyes. “What is it?” he asked, wondering if she wanted him to tweak something in the article, but she shook her head, her voice soft. “Nothing, just nothing.”)

* * *

In September he got Anea to drive him down to visit Sorelli.

He suspected it would be the last time he would be up to the journey, and he wanted to make it while he still could. She picked up the flowers for him before they left (tulips and irises, and some roses from his own garden), and he dozed in the car a while on the way, but she woke him ten minutes before they arrived at the graveyard, and when they stopped in the car park, she poured him tea out of a flask.

It was enough to revive him, and though he was just as stiff as he’d feared he would be when he got out of the car, he wasn’t as tired.

He stood for a long few minutes leaning against the car door, and then with his cane in one hand, and Anea on the other, he decided it was time to find Sorelli’s grave.

* * *

They made halting progress, his old bones not up to long car journeys anymore, though it could hardly be classed as that long of a journey, not much more than an hour. But Anea kept him steady as they walked, her voice gave him something to focus on that wasn’t his old pains, and by the time they made it to the quiet corner where Sorelli was buried, he’d freed up enough to be able stand up straight, or as straight as he could manage any day.

“Long time no see,” he said, softly, smiling to himself as he looked down at that familiar name and those dates. Anea set the flowers down, and stepped back for to give him privacy, but there was nothing, really, left for him to say, not after so many years.

(Twenty-four years, and almost half another one again.)

“Christine is wonderful but of course you know that,” he murmured, “and her Erik is the best man anyone could wish for. He makes her happy, and she does the same for him, and that’s all any of us could wish for.”

* * *

(“I’ll be along now before too long, so don’t cause too much trouble in my absence.”)

* * *

He was so tired that evening, after the journey. So tired, and he was dozing in his armchair when Christine came to see him.

She shook him awake, and told him to go to bed, that it was ready for him, and she’d bring him tea in a few minutes. And normally he’d argue with her, that he was not all that tired, just resting his eyes, but he was too tired even for that, so he nodded, and she helped him to his feet, and sent him on his way.

He’d changed his clothes, and settled under the covers, the pillows at his back, when she arrived with the tray, a mug of tea for each of them.

There was something he’d been meaning to ask her, something he’d been wondering over for a while. (Wondering over for forty-three years, really, in truth.) And when she settled on the bed beside him, her back against the headboard and shoulder pressed to his, he decided the time had come to ask her.

“There’s a song you sang for me once,” he whispered, “your future self. It was—it was 1973, and it didn’t exist yet, but you sang it anyway. I’d like to hear it if it—if it exists now.”

She eased her phone out of her pocket, pressed her thumb to the button and the screen opened. “How does it go, do you remember?”

He summoned the words to him across all the years, and hummed. “I remember.” And he sang it for her, what he remembered (“it’s handsome I am, a red-blooded man, I stand for what’s right oh as oft as I can...”)

* * *

He’d dozed again, by the time she found it, but she tapped his hand, and he stirred awake. “I’ve found it, I think,” she whispered, and he swallowed.

“Play it.”

And that was it, the same song, all these years later, made real.

He closed his eyes, and let the music wash over him.

* * *

She played the song for him several times, after that.

* * *

He could never show Christine most of his old photo albums, because there were too many photos of her older self in them and he didn’t want to spoil anything on her. So he only ever showed her a few, but Erik is different. With Erik he can share them, can let him glimpse Christine as she will become, as he is bound to meet her sometime, when she comes back.

Just because he, Raoul, will be gone, it does not mean she won’t come back to these times, these earlier years of her life. He knows she will, knows she will meet this younger Erik again when she is that future self, so he doesn’t mind showing Erik the albums.

That first evening they sat down with them, Christine off somewhere in time, he watched Erik looking at these old photos of Sorelli, how he brushed them with his fingertips, and knew that he was thinking that this was the woman Christine loves, knew he was aching to be able to meet her. It was in that tremor in his hands, and if Raoul could make it so they could meet, he would, without hesitation.

Sorelli would like Erik. Like that he’s fiery in his own way and cares about Christine and makes wonderful music and can do these things with computers that they never would have dreamt of. These computers were still new, when Sorelli was alive. They would never have imagined them becoming so ubiquitous.

But Sorelli would have liked Erik, and his kindness, and his cleverness, and that they could never meet is a tragedy of time.

The photographs will have to do.

He watched Erik brush that old photo of Sorelli and Philippe, 31 May 1938, and knew, then, that he would take out the albums with Christine too.

* * *

(The tears shone in Erik’s eyes looking at her in these photos, and Raoul squeezed his hand, and decided to make tea.)

(He has not told Erik, but the albums will be his, soon enough.)

* * *

There is a whole collection of graves he would visit again if he could, for one last time. Jack in Clare, Harry and Sheila in Belfast, Noël and Phyllis in Connemara. The dune where they threw Darius’ ashes from in Brittas. All these places he would make one last trip to, if he could. A tour of the people he misses most.

Not to be, now. But he lit a candle for each of them on the eve of All Souls’ Day, and it will have to be enough, that they have been in his heart and in his mind all along, and he has never once forgotten them.

Candles for them on the eve of All Souls’ Day, and candles for them now again, one week before he is due to die.

Just one week.

* * *

It was All Souls’ Day when Erik asked him about Sorelli. He was tired, and reflective, but there was a resolve in Erik’s face and Raoul knew he was building himself up to something, but he wasn’t sure what.

He just hoped it wasn’t anything serious.

When Erik sipped his tea, and set it down, and met his gaze, he knew the time had come.

“Tell me what Sorelli was like.”

Sorelli.

If ever there was a time to speak of Sorelli, it was then.

* * *

Maybe he should have told Erik of Sorelli, truly told him, long before then. But maybe it was that he had to wait until Erik made the first move, and he has not regretted waiting, not regretted Erik finding out on his own terms.

So he told him of her, and how she was the best and dearest person in the world, how she was beautiful and clever and fierce, and gentle too, and how she had loved Philippe and grieved him, and how she had loved Christine so very much.

So many stories he could tell him, of Sorelli helping him sort Philippe’s letters, of Sorelli going to London to look at the Casement stuff for him, of how she always kept a pencil behind her ear when she was studying a new script and how there was always a red pen in her pocket, how she would climb trees to pick the juiciest plums, and how she liked to sit out at night to watch the stars.

So many things he could tell Erik, and did, but there would never be time to tell him it all.

* * *

It was then that he knew he would have to tell them of Jack. Tell them of Jack, even if he could tell them of no one else.

He had to know they understood at least some of how it had been.

And Jack had had no one to immortalize his name, except what he and Harry had tried to do. Jack had no one else to remember him, except him, everyone else dead, and gone. And he could not have Jack forgotten, after his day, could not let all that beauty be lost to the world.

* * *

He told Christine, first, told her, and his voice cracked with the things he had left unspoken for sixty-four years, cracked with the things he had never been able to find words for, cracked with the weight of all that had happened, and the tears came, though he tried to keep them at bay, and she held his hands as he told her, her own eyes damp.

“Oh, Raoul,” she whispered, “oh, Raoul.”

* * *

(“I was always afraid I would forget him.” “But you never have and that’s what matters.” “I’m the last one left who knew him, and I don’t want—I don’t want him forgotten. He was—he was so much. So much life, so much—and that he died—it’s never seemed right, that he should die and I should live.” “We have no control over these things, you know that.” “I know, I do, but still.” “And I’ll meet him, won’t I? Some day?” “You will, several times. And you’ll come to see me after—After.” “Well then. I’ll make sure he’s never forgotten. I promise.” Her lips soft brushing his forehead. “I promise.”)

* * *

The tears came again as he told Erik, and Erik hugged him, and didn’t say a word, and that was enough, that was as much as a hundred words.

* * *

He has written his very last piece. It is to be published a month after he dies, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sorelli’s death. He has it finished, and edited, and has left instructions for the publishing of it, and that is all he can do.

And it is of Sorelli, and it is of Philippe, and Noël, and how the three of them were linked by that TB ward in Dr Steevens’ Hospital in 1938. Mostly it is of Sorelli, and her kindness, and how that TB ward was the turning point, and the girl she went into it as changed into the woman she left it as, grew into the Sorelli who was his dearest friend for more than fifty years.

A quiet, last tribute to them all. All that they were, and all that they might have been.

* * *

He dreams that night of a dance he was never at, a scene he never saw. Dreams of Sorelli in Philippe’s arms, the music winding gentle and low. Dreams of them in the glow of the candlelight, both of them young, both of them whole, Philippe’s smile soft and slow, his eyes shining, Sorelli laughing and her hair so dark, her hand pale cupping Philippe’s shoulder, stark against his black jacket. A lock of golden hair falling into Philippe’s eyes as he looks up from her and meets his gaze, and grins.

The swelling ache in his chest, the music fading. And when he opens his eyes to the grey morning light, he knows it won’t be long, now.

Won’t be long.

And behind his eyes, he sees them still dancing.


	43. 43

His life can be measured in days, now.

Days, down from months, and years, and decades.

* * *

He wonders, idly one morning, if this is what it is like for people going to be executed. This waiting, the knowledge of it heavy in his chest. That every hour is taking him closer to his appointed fate.

He wonders, but he doesn’t think so. He is not like someone bound for execution. Yes, he knows the hour of his death, but he knows, too, that it will be his own body failing him. It will not be a noose or an injection or a bullet. It will be quiet.

There is a peace, in knowing that.

He just hopes it isn’t going to be painful.

* * *

He has just a slight touch of a cold coming on. He can feel it in the back of his throat, sitting there, an irritation that he cannot shake.

There will be no shaking of it. It is the first touch of death, and its grip on him.

* * *

He is more tired than he can ever remember being in his life.

* * *

Christine comes to see him daily, now, and every time she does, he wonders if he should tell her what’s coming. Should tell her so that she can be ready, and it will not be too much of a shock. Heaven knows she’s had enough shocks to last her a lifetime and it would not do for him to inflict one more on her, so he resolves to try to tell her, that she can be somewhat prepared for it, but when he tries, on the evening of 16 March, the words catch in his throat, right there alongside that irritation, and refuse to come.

He gives her a thin smile, so she won’t worry, and sips the hot tea she’s made him, and wonders what it is about time that limits what he can and cannot tell her, and why it needs to be so cruel.

* * *

He knows Alex said he hadn’t wanted knowledge of his coming death hanging over Christine and that was why he never told her, but Raoul wonders, now, if maybe it might be that he wanted to, that he tried, and that unnameable thing stayed his tongue, and forced him to be silent.

* * *

He tells her instead about Philippe. Tells her about his little ways, how he scrapbooked the yacht racing results and was so particular in how he dressed and never come downstairs in the morning without first having shaved and combed his hair. How he never discussed politics with him, because he said Raoul would have to make up his own mind, when he was old enough to vote. How his smile transformed his face, and his eyes shone bright. How he liked slim cigars and despised cigarettes and always wore his signet ring.

(Raoul has never been able to bear wearing that ring.)

Told her all about him, and she never interrupted, just held his hand, and listened.

* * *

There have been future Christines in and out the last few days, coming to see him from all sorts of times, most of them very far in the future.

(2050 the most recent one had come from, most recent in time, not his most recent visitor.)

When she comes to him that evening from 2053, she insists he not exert himself to make her tea, and he sits in his armchair and listens to her potter in the kitchen, and wonders. Wonders if this is some sort of a focal point, if his death is a marker in time that draws her back, again and again and again, something with a significance that she can never escape.

There were two Christines, he knows, when Sorelli died. The one that was with her, and the one that was with him. And who is to say that there were not more Christines out there, somewhere, staying away or trying to hide on the date?

True, it was not the first time there were two Christines. There was the awards ceremony, too, when she was caught on tape, and that day in 1947 when her older self met her child self and so confused him, and there must have been loads of other times.

But there were two Christines the day Sorelli died, three if he counts her a baby newly born. And it sits oddly within him, that she should have to live that day a few times, return to her own time with knowledge of where she had been.

That once was not enough.

There’s a cruelty in that, too.

* * *

It is not that he does not want to see her from the future, does not enjoy her visits. He has always enjoyed her visits, even when he was first trying to get to grips with them all those years ago, after Sorelli first told him. But if coming back here to see him, now, so close to the end, only means that she has more to grieve when she returns to her own time, then he would prefer for her not to come, prefer that she not have to struggle with that.

She sets the tea down in front of him, and he gestures for her to sit on the arm of his chair. He is not sure how to phrase it, how to tell her this that has been on his mind, but he has to do it to ease this thing in his heart that feels like guilt.

A question, perhaps, is best.

He taps his fingers lightly on the back of her hand, and sighs. “Why is it that you keep—” The words catch in his throat, stall, and he swallows against them. “Why do you—” Dammit, lodged there again. “You know the way that I only—”

“Raoul.” Her voice is soft, her hand turning over to take his. “Are you asking why I keep getting drawn back to this time?”

_Thank God._

How she guesses at what he cannot ask he doesn’t know, only that he’s relieved that she has and has spared him needing to find the words. “Yes.”

She is silent a long time her fingers curled between his, and then, softly, “I think it’s because you’re continuous. You were—you are—you have been the only one I’ve known past and present. I knew you in the present, and I know you in the past, and I think it lies in that. That you were never confined to a time outside of my life, or confined to within my life, but both.” Silence, again, and he can feel there is more she wants to say, so he squeezes her hand, and waits for her, and her voice is fainter than before when she says, “I’ve seen my parents in the past, but I’ve never met their younger selves, never met my father from before I was born. And Sorelli—you know about Sorelli.” And he does, how he does, the ending of one life and the start of another. “So I think it’s you. You’re the overlap, a fixed point.” And she looks down at him, the tears damp in her eyes and prickling in the backs of his. “I wouldn’t change it, you know. I’d never change it, getting to have this extra time with you.”

* * *

It’s still on his mind later that day, when he hears the noise upstairs.

He thinks it is her come again, most likely it is. Or maybe the Christine that left him half an hour ago to go home to Erik got caught somewhere in time instead and has landed back here with him on her return. (A little part of him hopes for that, so he can hear of her travels one more time.) He would not be surprised if it were one last visit from Alex, but he doubts if it is, though he’d enjoy it.

A muffled curse from the floor above, but he can’t make out the voice.

His back cracks as he eases himself out of his chair. Whether it’s Christine or Alex, there should be tea ready for them.

He sets two mugs on the table, puts the tea bags in them and takes out the milk, and the plate of chocolate digestives that he keeps ready.

His deafness has gotten worse the last while, enough that he can’t distinguish which Daaé the step on the stairs belongs to. Another sign of what’s coming for him, he supposes, though the steps are drawing closer now. The kettle flicks off, and he pours the boiling water in on top of the tea bags, then sets the kettle back down and picks up a spoon for to stir.

Then looks up into the face of a girl he has never seen before in his life.

* * *

It is some amount of comfort that she is staring at him just the same, eyes wide.

One blue, one hazel.

The spoon clatters to the table.

* * *

It is to his credit that he does not faint, though he does lower himself heavily into a chair.

* * *

“Raoul de Chagny?” The query in her voice, the musicality beneath his name like Christine but not Christine, different, her blonde hair short and curled.

He nods, and she pales. “Oh my God.”

* * *

Rachel Daaé.

Rachel Daaé- _Ansborough_.

Rachel _Eleanor_ Daaé-Ansborough.

* * *

Christine and Erik’s daughter.

Christine and Erik’s daughter, named after him and Sorelli (“they couldn’t think of any girl’s name that sounds like Raoul,” said with a faint smile).

This girl of twenty-two, Christine and Erik’s daughter, a time traveller too.

* * *

Of all the things—

* * *

Her thumb is soft, wiping the tears from his cheeks.

“I’ve always wanted to meet you,” and she’s smiling.

* * *

“Your mother never told me about you.” He’s hoarse, but God all the _times_ Christine came back. She could have said something. It would have been nice to know.

And Rachel grins. “I knew she wouldn’t.”

* * *

The tea is ruined, but she boils the kettle again while he gains his composure, and after she’s made it, just as he likes it, he notices, she sits down across the table from him, and tells him about the future.

* * *

(Christine, a distinguished historian like he knew she would be. Head of the History Department, and she’s written that book about Noël that he knew she would, and one about Sorelli, too, and another about Philippe. “They made a film a couple of years ago about what happened,” Rachel says, “and it was nothing like that mess they wanted to make in the eighties. Mom was so pissed when she heard about that. This one was proper, and you know it was done right because she was the historical consultant…” Erik, still tinkering at his computers, creating things out of codes and making music. “…Dad did the soundtrack for it and it won loads of awards. I don’t think he could really believe it…”)

(“…they were frightened when they knew they were going to have me in case something would go wrong with all the time stuff, but apparently my future self went back and gave them a shock and said everything would be all right…they still decided one was enough to have…”)

(“I’m writing my own book about you,” and she grins that bright grin again, “or I will be when I get my thesis finished which is still ages away. Dad has written some stuff from what you told him, but mine’s going to be a proper history book and he says it’s as well because anything he knows of history is what you and Mom told him.” Her lip twitches, her smile fading, and there’s that contemplative look in her eye that he’s seen so many times in Christine’s and knows it means she’s thinking about time. “I suppose—I suppose that’s why I’ve come back to now, to see you. So that you can know, and maybe—maybe so I can know if you’d be happy with it.”)

(He smiles at her, and squeezes her hand. “I am happy with it,” and he’s hoarse, still, with the cold and the emotion and the thought of this girl coming back to all these years before she was born to ask his permission to write her book about him. “And I know you’ll do a wonderful job with it.”)

* * *

She goes, and he sits, a long time, watching the empty space where she was sitting, hardly daring to believe that she was here at all.

Then he cleans the mugs away, and sits down, and writes a letter to Erik.

* * *

He doesn’t say anything about Rachel, but he says a lot of other things that need to be said, and when Erik comes the next evening, with his violin, and says, softly, “I have something I want you to hear,” Raoul slips it into the violin case, while he’s looking away, readying himself.

Only three days left after this one. Something for him to have, for after.

Then Erik sets the bow to the string, and closes his eyes, and the music that winds around Raoul takes his breath away.

* * *

That Erik composed a piece for he and Jack—

* * *

He closes his eyes, the tears trickling down his cheeks, and as the music winds around him, the memories come, soft and gentle.

He sits deeper in his chair, and surrenders himself to them.


	44. 44

He doesn’t sleep very much at all that night, his heart too full, the tightness in his chest. This pressure that makes it so hard to breathe, and he slips in and out of dreams, dreams of Jack in his arms and Rachel passing him tea and Erik and Christine laughing together and Sorelli studying a script, asking him to help her rehearse, and Philippe, Philippe holding his hand like when he was a boy and they went for walks in the fields. So many dreams, fractures, and pieces, and he wakes from them cold and shivering, coughing around the pain in his chest, the sweat beading cold on his skin. 

By morning he can’t hold out any longer, his heart racing with little shooting pains, his lungs burning with each breath. Sorelli would be disgusted if she thought he wasn’t minding himself, disgusted if she thought he wasn’t worried, and he is worried, just a little, worried that now what Christine told him might be wrong and he’ll go faster than he thought and he doesn’t want to, he can’t, he wants every moment, but God the _pain_ — 

He hears Anea at the door, and he straightens up, just enough, so that he can meet her gaze when she comes in, and she pales at the sight of him. 

Before she can say anything, he gasps, and whispers, “get an ambulance,” and then the darkness swims in and takes him away.

* * *

He comes back to her face, swimming before him, pale and drawn. Comes back to her shoulder solid and real beneath his head, her arms around him. Comes back to the pain still heavy in his chest, her fingers at his throat, the colours of the room all blurring and swirling. 

He gasps and closes his eyes, feels Anea’s hand cupping his cheek. 

“It’s on its way,” she whispers, “is there anything I can get you?” 

He shakes his head, tries to, the room still spinning, that old vertigo back again as vicious as it ever was and the bile rises burning in his throat. 

He swallows it down and gasps again. “No. Just—just don’t tell Christine, not yet. Don’t want her—don’t want her to worry—” 

“Raoul—” 

He forces his eyes open, the room still spinning. “Please, Anea. Please. Just—just a few hours. Not going to—not going to go yet.” 

That heaviness in his chest. If he could just breathe, just breathe properly— 

Anea nodding, her hand sliding, cupping the back of his head. “All right, all right.” 

The colour bleeds from the world again.

* * *

In and out. A rush of unfamiliar faces, words he can’t make out. Anea there, always. 

A pinch in his arm and he feels it cold in his blood, whatever they’ve given him. For a moment it’s 1952 again and Noël’s jaw is set firm, then he’s back and Anea’s hand is curled right around his own, everything jolting, shaking. 

The pain eases and he draws a breath, easier than before, and when sleep comes he gives into it.

* * *

Voices, muffled. Fingers, hands. His breath hitches, and knuckles dig into his chest, make him gasp. The quiet, soft again.

* * *

When he opens his eyes, Christine is there. 

Everything is dulled, far away, the air he breathes cold in his nose and he realizes they’ve put something over his face. 

He closes his eyes again, and her fingers are gentle, brushing over his forehead. 

“Christine.” All he can do to whisper her name. 

“Don’t say anything, Raoul.” He can hear the tears in her voice. “Just—just save your strength.” 

This poor dear girl. 

His eyes flicker open again, and he manages a smile for her. A tear slips silver down her cheek, and he tries to raise his hand, to smooth it away, but there are wires and things and he’s too tired. She threads her fingers between his, and smiles.

* * *

There’s no pain. 

The fact of that is a relief.

* * *

Erik knows. He can see it in the boy’s face, the red rim of his eyes. Erik knows, and Raoul squeezes his hand, because it’s all he can do, and he wants him to know that it’s all right, that it’s best this way. 

Erik nods, and squeezes his hand back.

* * *

Anea will look after them both, will be there for them after he—after him. She’s been too good to him, all along. He would have been lost without her. 

He has a memory of writing that in a letter for her. He wishes he could find words to say it out loud, but she kisses his hair and he thinks she understands. 

(She’s already agreed, a promise made, to take a lock of his hair and bury it at Philippe’s grave. As close as he will be able to get.)

* * *

The night is still, quiet. Erik is dozing in the chair, and Anea has slipped outside, but Christine is awake, watching him. He can see the blue of her eyes through the low light. 

“I’m glad,” he whispers, _glad you’re here_ , _glad you’ve always been here_ , _glad to have had you in my life_ …“Glad,” he whispers, and he hasn’t the breath to say the rest. 

She smiles, a faint smile, and kisses his fingers. 

“I know,” she whispers. “I’m glad too.”

* * *

Mostly he sleeps, but when he wakes, they’re always there.

* * *

He’s not sure he dreams. If he does, he doesn’t remember them when he wakes. Doesn’t matter now. There’ll be time enough for all that later.

* * *

Christine always there, beside him. 

He’d tell her to get some rest if he could, but she wouldn’t listen.

* * *

He thinks, just once, to ask the date. 

Christine kisses his forehead. “20 March,” she whispers, “2017.” 

Something about it feels like it should be important, but he can’t remember what, now. 

“Just sleep,” she whispers. “Sleep.”

* * *

That night she comes to him. 

Comes to him from the future, many many years in the future. So far the thought of it is beyond what he can comprehend. 

His Christine, the Christine of this time, is asleep, her head on his shoulder. Anea and Erik nowhere in sight, and the older Christine, the oldest Christine, sits beside her younger self, and smiles at him. 

There are tears in her eyes, and her fingers are trembling as she brushes the ones from his cheek. 

“It won’t be long now,” she whispers, “for either of us.” 

That she, too, is coming to her end in her own time makes his throat tight. 

“You’ve been—happy?” All he can do to get breath for words. 

She nods. “Very.” 

His eyes slip closed. “Good. And—Rachel?” 

“Just as wonderful as you knew she’d be.” 

That she knows, in that far away time, what he was thinking as he met her daughter— 

Another tear slips down his cheek. She brushes it away. 

“And—and Erik?” 

“Outside getting some air. It’s strange seeing him so young again. He’s,” her breath catches, “he’s been gone a couple of years now.” 

His heart aches, and he draws a shaky breath. “I’m sorry.” 

“I know you are. I know.” She kisses his forehead, kisses his cheek. “Sleep well, my friend.” Her voice hoarse. “Sleep well.” 

He closes his eyes, and feels her slip away.

* * *

He sleeps.

* * *

Christine, there when he wakes. Christine, tears in her eyes. Christine, trying to smile for him. Christine, kissing his fingers. 

The room muffled, light low with the night, and he would say something to her, if he could, would tell her—tell her that she’s been—tell her— 

He makes a noise, he must, because she squeezes his hand tighter. “You don’t have to say anything,” she whispers, “I know.”

* * *

“I’d have been lost without you,” her voice low in his ear, but his eyes are too heavy to open. “I wish I could say—wish I could tell you all—”

His fingers tighten around hers, and she quietens, and he sleeps.

* * *

In his dreams he can feel them. Can feel Christine’s breath against his neck, her head heavy on his shoulder, can feel her hand curled around his. Can feel Erik beside her, quiet, but there. Can feel Anea at his other side, willing him just to rest, and he thinks she might be right. 

Can feel them so close, each of them. 

How he loves them. 

He would tell them if he could, but his eyes are too heavy to open. 

His fingers twitch, and Christine’s tighten around them.

* * *

“You can stop fighting, stop fighting. We’ll be all right, I promise. You can rest now, rest…” Her voice a whisper, her lips, soft against his cheek. A whisper, like silk.

A whisper—

* * *

Philippe’s face is pressed close to his. His brother at his side and how he’s missed him, missed him so much, for so long. Sorelli squeezes his hand and smiles at him, kisses his knuckles. There are tears in Darius’ eyes, slipping down his cheeks. And Jack— 

Jack strokes back his hair, and brushes his lips to his, and he sighs, and feels the darkness close at hand. 

Jack’s breath warm in his mouth. Jack’s fingers, resting against his cheek.

Jack.

A tear slips from Philippe’s eye, his voice muffled, soft.

“Raoul.”

He leans into his brother, and feels his arms come around him, and sighs.


End file.
